a garden."

"O! the divil fetch him," says I. "He would be glad to know how I come in
a garden, would he? Well, now, my dear man, just have the civility to
tell the Sahib, with my kind love, that we are two soldiers here whom he
never met and never heard of, but the cipaye is a broth of a boy, and I
am a broth of a boy myself; and if we don't get a full meal of meat, and
a turban, and slippers, and the value of a gold mohur in small change as
a matter of convenience, bedad, my friend, I could lay my finger on a
garden where there is going to be trouble."

They carried their comedy so far as to converse a while in Hindustanee;
and then says the Hindu, with the same smile, but sighing as if he were
tired of the repetition, "The Sahib would be glad to know how you come
in a garden."

"Is that the way of it?" says I, and laying my hand on my sword-hilt I
bade the cipaye draw.

Ballantrae's Hindu, still smiling, pulled out a pistol from his bosom,
and though Ballantrae himself never moved a muscle I knew him well
enough to be sure he was prepared.

"The Sahib thinks you better go away," says the Hindu.

Well, to be plain, it was what I was thinking myself; for the report of
a pistol would have been, under Providence, the means of hanging the
pair of us.

"Tell the Sahib I consider him no gentleman," says I, and turned away
with a gesture of contempt.

I was not gone three steps when the voice of the Hindu called me back.
"The Sahib would be glad to know if you are a dam low Irishman," says
he; and at the words Ballantrae smiled and bowed very low.

"What is that?" says I.

"The Sahib say you ask your friend Mackellar," says the Hindu. "The
Sahib he cry quits."

"Tell the Sahib I will give him a cure for the Scots fiddle when next we
meet," cried I.

The pair were still smiling as I left.

There is little doubt some flaws may be picked in my own behaviour; and
when a man, however gallant, appeals to posterity with an account of his
exploits, he must almost certainly expect to share the fate of Caesar
and Alexander, and to meet with some detractors. But there is one thing
that can never be laid at the door of Francis Burke: he never turned his
back on a friend....

(Here follows a passage which the Chevalier Burke has been at the pains
to delete before sending me his manuscript. Doubtless it was some very
natural complaint of what he supposed to be an indiscretion on my part;
though, indeed, I can call none