ey have been
neglected, and how much waste of valuable timber has ensued. The
natives have a practice of girdling fine trees, at a few feet from the
root, in order to strip off as much of the bark as they can
conveniently reach. It is rather a difficult practice to check; but,
if we can manage to draw a line between the woods in which the
villagers have rights and the public forests, we may impose heavy
penalties on the perpetrators of such offences.... The deodar forests
cease at the Rotung Pass. There are no forests of any value in Lahoul
and Spitti--scarcely indeed any wood at all.

We are now proceeding towards the Kangra Valley, where we expect to
find tea plantations in a more advanced condition.

[Sidenote: Illness.]

In this letter, and others of the same date, there is no hint of suffering
or of ill-health; but when they were written he had already received the
stroke which was to lay him in the grave. Before the departure of the next
mail symptoms had appeared of serious disease of the heart, probably long
lurking in his constitution, and now brought out into fatal activity by
fatigue and the keen mountain air; and on the 4th of November, having with
difficulty reached Dhurmsala, a station in the Kangra Valley,[3] he wrote
to Sir Charles Wood in an altered tone, yet still hopeful and cheerful; and
intent to the last in India, as at the first in Jamaica, and afterwards in
Canada and China, on mitigating so far as lay in his power the evils which
man brings on man.

[Sidenote: Last letter.]

You will not expect (he wrote, in this his last letter) to hear much
from me by this mail when you hear how I am situated. The Hill
expedition, of which I gave you some of the details in my last, had an
unexpected effect upon me; knocking me down prostrate to begin with,
with some symptoms of an anxious character behind, which require
looking into. The nature and extent of the mischief are not
sufficiently ascertained yet to enable me to say positively whether my
power of doing my duty is likely to be in any degree impaired by what
has happened. But Lady Elgin has brought up from Calcutta the medical
man who attended me there, and he arrived this morning; so that a
consultation will take place without delay. Meanwhile I have got over
the immediate effects sufficiently to enable me to do such business as
comes before me now. N