East where there are
no such places to obtain food or shelter from the powerful rays of the
sun, this is an inestimable boon. On enquiring how these Topes or groves
came to grow in places so far distant from any other cultivation, I was
informed that they were planted by rich high caste natives, as a penance
that was imposed upon them by the Brahmin priests for sins of omission
or commission against their creed. By the way, I heard the other day a
good story concerning these said Topes. It appears that a certain ensign
of the Company's service, who had been furnished with his commission and
outfit by an elderly maiden aunt of a serious and pious turn of mind,
whose positive injunctions to him on leaving England were that he was
not to attempt to impose upon her with any account of dangers,
difficulties, or surprising adventures that were not strictly true, for
she hated liars, and would cut him out of her will if she detected him
indulging in anything of the sort; but requested that he would write to
her a full, true and particular account of his first battle, should he
be engaged in one.

"At the commencement of his first campaign he wrote to the old lady a
long descriptive letter, but unfortunately he did not pay sufficient
attention to his orthography, and so came to grief, for one paragraph of
the letter ran thus:

"'Our entire brigade, ten thousand strong, halted about six in the
morning, and by seven the whole of the tents were snugly pitched, and we
were taking our breakfast comfortably in the tops of trees which grew on
both sides of the road.'

"He spelt the word Topes without the capital or letter e. Tents for ten
thousand men pitched in the tops of trees. Oh, was there ever such a
monstrous falsehood, and the poor old lady fairly shook from head to
foot with pious indignation. The letter was returned to the writer
without remark or comment, and she was never again heard to mention the
name of her nephew, and on her death, which occurred soon after, it was
found that she had bequeathed the whole of her property to establish a
mission for diffusing the Gospel truth among the natives of the Fiji
Islands, and the unfortunate victim to bad spelling was left lamenting."

In another of his epistles to the fair young girl in merry England, he
winds up with the following: "Much has been said and written concerning
the sagacity of some animals, especially the elephant, horse and dog,
but the other day I was an eye