still there is picking to be done until a “turieh" is laid to the roots. With the water turned off it would appear a simple matter to keep the hawashas clean of cotton on the ground, but as the days lengthen and the sun scorches down, it is increasingly difficult. The natives are bored with it, the extraneous Arabs depart to their homes, and the hours of work decrease tremendously. The cotton gradually gets thinner and lighter, until at the end of May the welcome order arrives" cut out." Even in this there is a good deal of work. The tenants have to be told to leave a fringe uncut surrounding the hawasha until all the centre is cut out and burned. The reason for this is that May is the month of "haboobs," jolly little storms of sand that will blow a stationary Ford over. The fringe of standing cotton acts as a check to the blown stalks of the rest, and prevents to a certain extent seed being broadcast over the neighbourhood. However, a good strong haboob will lift all the cut stalks clean out, and deposit them hundreds of yards away. The cut stalks are collected in the hawashas and burnt, generally at night, at which time, when there is a moon, much of the cutting is done to avoid the stupendous heat of the day. As each hawasha is cleared the inspector takes it over, and sees that stumps are not sticking out above the ground, which could in the following

season grow again among the dhura or cow beans and spread disease. If it is cut well below the surface level, the white ants do the rest.

There are two pretty sights in that endless plain. The first is the young cotton in a newly heshed hawasha, and the second is to see the stuff burning. From the setting of the sun far into the night the funeral pyres crackle and burn, leap up many feet into the air and then subside, twinkling for miles and miles around. With a long drink and reclining in a longer chair placed on the roof, two buckets of tepid— the coldest-water to dip your hands into at odd intervals, you can watch the darned stuff going to blazes, knowing that for six months at least you will not have to say "Pick the cotton." Once cut and burned, the plain turns into a barrenlooking desert without a vestige of green, nothing to rest the eye upon. Sandflies, which defy a mosquito net even if you could breathe under one, turn the hot nights into a veritable hell. Not a breath of wind stirs the air until the false dawn, and for one blissful hour the tormentors leave their prey. So long as there is a breeze the sandflies won't come near you. Girt in a towel you lie in the glare of a maddening moon, and pray for a breeze. Sometimes it comes, unheralded, like a giant's breath, in a flash. In grasping the sheet, the pillows are blown from under your head, the moon is

put out in a blast of sand and grit. As suddenly as it came so it goes away, and you wander about the garden looking for your bedding. No sooner have you collected it and winked an eye than the sun is touching the horizon to call you to another day in the furnace. Out in the sun, round the same places, not a sign of shade even from a hut, for the sun stands all day straight overhead. Water does not seem to quench a thirst, and you don't dare to think of ice, for it does not exist. At mid-day you return to the coolth of a room whose shutters and windows have been closed all the morning since sunrise. The thermometer registers 90, but it is like an ice-house to walk into. A bath in the ever diminishing water from the canal, tepid and turgid, and then lunch, with the usual buckets of water on each side of you. A siesta after lunch, which is no more than another hearty sweat, a bath, and out again into the sun still standing nearly vertically overhead. But at 6 P.M. it begins to sink, until with a rush it is gone, and night descends like a pall.

Another day gone, another season finished, another dividend declared.

Little is left to do now except turf out the most glaringly idle tenants and hand their hawashas over to new men.

Hope springs eternal, they may be better; on the other hand, worse. An allowance is paid out on the number of sacks picked, and the cycle begins again.

Cotton is not an easy crop to grow, for it is very sensitive to ill-handling, changes of temperature, and pests. But grow it can to six feet and more in a season and defy a proper picking. A hundred men in a hawasha can sometimes make little impression on the amount of bursting bolls, and in some parts it grows so thick and strong that it is hard work making way through it. Its cultivation provides an endless task under conditions that are not always easy, and generally the reverse, but at the same time produces a commodity of many uses. As a man off leave was heard to remark, "Back again to grow undies; what would the women do without us?"

THERE is no prouder soldier in the Indian Army than a Jat Sikh. Sobha Singh firmly believed that there was no "rissala" (Indian cavalry regiment) among all in the army of the Sirkar like unto the 10th Cavalry, and no troop in the 10th Cavalry like unto Sobha Singh's troop of Jat Sikhs. Which was as it should have been.

Unlike most Jat Sikhs in the best regiments, Sobha Singh was small of stature, and to him this was ever a source of mortification, for it was not as became a warrior of the Khalsa. Moreover, the Sahibs knew this, and loved a stalwart Sikh. It had only been on account of the services of his father, who had been Ressaldar Major of the regiment during the Afghan War, that the son had been finally passed and sworn in as a recruit. Perhaps this fact had conduced to make him unusually silent and reserved.

steel about the sheaths, lest perchance the edges should suffer in the drawing, and then the drawing was made with care. Even now, when no longer a jowan (i.e., young man), none could excel him in feats of circus riding or skill at arms. With his sword he scarcely ever failed to sever his sheep at a gallop, when suspended dead in its fleece from a pole. He would take his tent peg edge-on with a lance, or riding bare-backed with his sword, and standing on his saddle at a gallop, make good practice with a revolver. On his breast he bore a frontier medal of many clasps, which the new Sahibs when they joined would ask to see; and when he was awarded the last one, his squadron commander had said with a laugh, "Sobha Singh, you'll have to tuck your medal under your belt now!"

Twice he had been wounded, once in the turmoil round Kabul, and once in an encounter with raiders in the Meranzai Valley. Though tough and wiry, the bitter winds from the snows in winter would give him twinges of rheumatism. At such times his temper became fiery, and his hatred of the Muhammadan was fanned again-a hatred handed down to him by genera

on

tions of freebooting forbears from the days when the Sikhs first suffered persecution at the hands of the Emperor Jehangir, and the Guru (High Priest) Arjun Mal had been barbarously done to death. Only in the regiment, where the Sirkar in their incomprehensible wisdom insisted the young men of the Khalsa serving as brothers with the followers of the accursed prophet, did Sobha Singh not allow his feelings to interfere with his duty. For had he not sworn an oath to obey in all things-an oath which was to him second only to that with which he had taken the Pal?

Sobha Singh was not without ambition, but it was a limited one. Closer to his heart than ought else lay his home, nestling on the outskirts of the village far away under the Simla foothills, and the few broad acres which remained to him of the many once owned by his ancestors under Ranjit Singh, the Lion of the Panjab. They dwelt in a small fort, the ruins of which were still to be seen on a low rocky outcrop, and had led their lances to harry the countryside far and wide in times of chaos, and in times of war had joined the army of the Khalsa down to the day when his grandfather had fallen at Sobraon. Since then bad years, reckless expenditure over mar

riages, and other extravagance had combined to play havoc with the family fortunes. Now a low bred Hindu banniah lorded it where his ancestors had been supreme, and there were no bounds to his presumption and avarice. Even in his father's time, who had retired after many years as a Ressaldar Major and a Sirdar Bahadur, when the "Mulki "1 Sahibs had visited the village, the banniah had been given preference by those who were ignorant; and now matters were even worse. Sobha Singh longed to win distinction, so that when his time came to eat his pension he would at least do so in equal honour with his father, and his dream was to attain to the British honorary rank of captain. Then only would there be no question of precedence, and he would put the hated banniah in his place. But so far, though he had done his duty and bore the scars of war, no such opportunity for distinction had occurred, and few presented themselves in the ordinary round of routine.

He was no longer young. His long hair when he let it down and his beard would have been streaked with grey had they not been dyed. The former was concealed by his safir (paggaree), and his beard, always scrupulously tended, worn twisted up and coiled back over his ears, was

coal black to look on. But his But his spirit was free as ever, his energy undiminished, and his eye undimmed. Probably on account of his size, he was unusually quick in thought and action for a Sikh, and possessed a wonderful eye for ground. His British officers felt they never got at the back of his mind; his sowars feared him in his wrath, but admired and loved him, for he was a leader after their own heart.

It was a May morning on the edge of the wide alluvial plain which stretches for hundreds of miles down the right bank of the Indus below the Gorge of Kalabagh. The spring crops had been garnered into the hamlets, where stacks of fodder showed above the walls. The sun stood high in a firmament of molten brass, and beat fiercely down, rendering the stones almost unbearable to the touch.

Inside the police post were piqueted a number of gamelooking little cavalry horses, sweating in the heat. On a charpoy (native bed) in a small room under the blockhouse sat Ressaldar Sobha Singh, very much en déshabillé, chatting to a couple of orderlies, who squatted on the floor. A chaddar (sheet) lay folded at the head of the bed, and on it some uniform with a service revolver and pouch. A sword hung by its belt on the wall, and a carbine leant up against a corner. In another corner lay a bundle of saddlery, which had just been brought in by

one of the orderlies, wrapped in a waterproof sheet.

It was the season when the tribesmen were most prone to raid. The border had been far from quiet, and the outposts had been strengthened from the nearest cantonment. In addition to its usual garrison of about a dozen police, armed with out-of-date army rifles, the post now held a full troop of the 10th Frontier Force Cavalry.

The ressaldar had just returned from a patrol to the nearest police post ten miles away, and, after a simple meal, was resting and sheltering during the noonday heat, which was anything up to 125 degrees in the shade.

Out in the courtyard two or three sowars in uniform sat chatting in low tones at the door of another room, their carbines leaning against the wall at their sides: they were the reliefs for the sentry up above. A stable orderly in undress sat half asleep in the shade watching over the horses, which stamped and flicked. their long tails at the flies buzzing about them. From inside the long room came a low murmur of voices.

Sobha Singh mopped his face with a towel not too white, and turned about with a sigh of content to lay him down on the bed, when a shout rang out from the look-out on the roof of the blockhouse

"Ho! Rattan Singh ! I see the signal smoke rising on the hill above the tangi, and