up and holding them up, so that
they cannot fall. Then prickly shrubs and thorny trees follow, fighting
for every inch of ground, but quite unable to eject the gently
persistent custard-apple, descended doubtless from seeds which the
garrison dropped as they ate the luscious fruit, on account of which the
Portuguese introduced the tree from South America. I had penetrated
into that fort and had seen something of the snakes and birds of night,
but not the ghosts and demons which I was assured made it their
habitation by day.

On a level place a little below the fort stood two monuments, telling of
the days when the Honourable East India Company maintained a "Resident"
at this place. Here he lived in proud solitude, upholding the British
flag. But his wife and the little one on whose face he had not yet
looked were on their way from Bombay in a native "pattimar" to join him,
and as he stood gazing over the sea at the red setting sun one 5th of
October, he thought of the glad to-morrow and the end of his dreary
loneliness. It fell to him to put up one of these monuments, with a
sorrowful inscription to all that was left to him on the following
morning, the "memory" of a beloved wife and an infant thirty-one days
old, drowned in crossing the bar on October 6, 1853.

We have strewed our best to the weeds unrest,
To the shark and the sheering gull.
If blood be the price of admiralty,
Lord God, we ha' paid in full.

I carried my gun and rifle with me in my yacht. They served to keep up
my character as a sportsman, and did not often require to be cleaned. So
the morning calm of my mind was lashed into an unwonted tempest of
excitement when my jolly skipper, Sheikh Abdul Rehman, came in and told
me briefly that a "bag" (which word does not rhyme with rag, but must
be pronounced like barg without the _r_ and signifies a tiger or
panther) had killed a cow in the village the night before last.

When he added that the villagers had set a spring gun for it last
evening and it had returned to the "kill" and been badly wounded, my
excitement was turned into wrath. I had been at anchor here all
yesterday. The Indian ryot everywhere turns instinctively to the _sahib_
as his protector against all wild beasts. What did these men mean by
keeping their own counsel and setting an infernal machine for their
enemy? Abdul Rehman explained, and the explanation was simple and
sufficient. My fat predecessor in the appointment that I he