dissect the skin of the fingertips before they could take any impression.

To a Punjabi officer, Colonel (then Captain) H. Smith, I.M.S., belongs the honour of being the first to point out the possibility of forging finger-print impressions. Again, to revert to Mr Freeman's stories, his many admirers will remember what effective play he makes with the forging of finger-print impressions by means of the chromo-lithographic process. In August 1901 (and remember that Scotland Yard only started its finger-print bureau in July 1901) Captain Smith wrote to Mr Rundle pointing out that finger-print impressions could be forged perfectly by means of the above process. Hitherto no such forgery has come to notice in the Punjab, but unquestionably the Punjabi crook will turn his attention to this promising development sooner or later. When he does, however, it is safe to assume that he will find the Phillaur men “ware and waking," and, after the manner of the Indian Police, a colourless sentence in an obscure official report will chronicle another noteworthy victory over criminal genuity.

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At the end of each year the head of the bureau writes an administration report. This is severely restrained in expression, and consists for the most part of hard facts and bare figures, for, as Kipling long ago observed, "The Punjab Government does not approve

of romancing." Nevertheless, romance will out, even from the prudish pages of a Punjab report, and every now and then from the dusty sheet steps forth a story of the true breed, whose high lineage is not to be concealed even by the rough homespun of the official jargon in which it is clad. Twenty-six reports have issued up to date from the unpretentious room in Phillaur Fort, and not one of them but contains stories beyond anything which is dreamed of in the philosophies of our detective story writers.

And here let me dispose of a very common misconception in regard to the work of fingerprint bureaux. The general notion, to which currency is given by the amateur investigators who provide us with the bulk of our detective fiction, is that these bureaux spend most of their time tracking criminals by means of finger prints which have been incautiously left by cracksmen on windows, silver, the polished surfaces of safes, and the like. Actually such work is an almost negligible part of their activities, for it is clear that such prints can only be of use when they are already on record, or when the person who is suspected of having made them is already in custody. The day-to-day routine is fully occupied by the classifying and filing of slips sent for record and the tracing of search slips, which pour in by every mail. Still, the popular idea is not

Some years ago the Western Punjab districts of Jhang, Montgomery, Shahpur, and Multan were the scenes of a series of burglaries, all of which were obviously the work of one very skilful and mobile gang. Now every Punjab district is infested by members of many criminal and wandering tribes, whose homes are in this and the neighbouring provinces ; and although it soon became certain that one of these bands was responsible for the burglaries, the task of hitting on the right gang seemed almost hopeless. But one night, after a burglary committed in the Jhang district, a single thumb impression was found on a pane of glass. A photograph of this was prepared in the bureau and circulated, and at once the police of Jhang and the neighbourhood districts fell to. Every wanderer who came within their ken was made to record his finger impressions, and, finally, the right man was caught-far away from the scene of his crime. Phillaur gave expert confirmation of the identification by the local police, and through him the other members of his gang were rounded up and convicted of numerous burglaries.

Coining is, with many of the criminals of India, a popular and profitable pastime, for, given a handful of prepared earth, a cupful of water, and a little white metal, they will

The Ferozepore Police were informed a short time ago that in one of their villages a Sadhu, a religious mendicant, was regularly making counterfeit coins with the help of a neighbour named Bahadur. The police at once went round and searched the houses of the two men. From the Sadhu they got a rich haul of counterfeit coins and materials for counterfeiting, but Bahadur's house was as bare of these trophies as the famous cupboard was of bones. But among the articles found in the Sadhu's house was

a piece of clay, and a keen-sighted policeman noticed that this bore marks resembling the impress of the palm of a hand. The clay was sent to Phillaur, together with the palm impressions of Bahadur and the Sadhu, and the bureau showed that the clever policeman's surmise had been correct, and further, that the impression had been made by Bahadur's hand. His collusion with the Sadhu was thus proved, and the pair went away for the lengthy terms of imprisonment which await the counterfeiter of coins in India.

Much of the social life of India centres in the many fairs which are held in every one of its districts. Readers of Tom Brown's Schooldays' will remember what a bright colour

was imported into the humdrum lives of the dwellers in the Vale of White Horse by the annual "feast," whilst the famous Stourbridge Fair was once a vivid strand in the social life of all England. Indian rustics nowadays live much the same sort of lives as did their peers in England a century or more ago, and so these fairs are for many of them the one "taste of life which they get in the year. But in addition to much innocent enjoyment and merry-making, much crime and blackguardism goes on at these celebrations, and a couple of stories will show something of this other side of the shield.

Some years ago a peasant taking some cattle to sell at the local fair asked a friend to accompany him. At a ford of the Ravi the friend beat out his companion's brains, and buried his corpse in the sand of a little eyot. Then he went to the fair, where he sold the cattle, and returned to his home with his ill-gotten gains. When he affixed his thumb impression to the register of sales at the Octroi post hard by the fair ground, he little thought that he was by that act signing his death-warrant. Yet so it was, for when his friend remained absent from home, inquiries were started. The sale of his cattle was proved, and suspicion fell on the murderer, who had been seen on the road with the missing man. Yet when the Phillaur experts took his finger

impressions and compared them with those in the Octroi register; they were at first checked by discovering that the latter could not be shown to correspond with the impressions of the suspect. They took his finger impressions again, but with the same negative result. Then a keen fellow from the bureau looked closely at the record in the Octroi register, and at the suspect's thumb, on which he smeared ink, and then suddenly dabbed it perpendicularly on the paper, thus getting a print of a part of the thumb which is never recorded in the ordinary "rolled " impression. And, hey Presto! that was it! The two prints then corresponded absolutely, and the gallows claimed its

own.

There is much broad humour in the second story, and it is a pity that lack of space prevents my telling it in detail. Kasu had been a famous horse-thief in the good old days before the Jhang bar was turned from primeval wilderness into fat canal land, and even in these later degenerate days still managed to find some scope for his talents. Having served six months in jail, and thinking, no doubt, that one good turn deserved another, he "lifted " the favourite mare of the magistrate who had given him his sentence, and took her to the Lyallpur horse fair. There he chanced to meet an old prison friend named Lalu, who cast a covetous eye on the mare,

knowing well, of course, that no friend of his was likely to have acquired her honestly. Now one learns many things in jail, and so Lalu did not allow desire to outrun discretion. If he bought stolen property he was not going to commit the bêtise of buying it from an ex-convict, especially from one of Kasu's calibre. He looked around, therefore, until he saw his friend Ahmad, and with him and Kasu he concocted quite a neat little plan. Ahmad would be the seller of the mare for the purposes of registration, for he (alas, for the vanity of human precautions!) had a good name, and his finger print was nowhere on record. So, under the name of Sultana, Ahmad "sold" the mare to Lalu, and put his thumb mark in the book. But the thoughtless fellow had quite omitted to make known the fact that of the six months which he had spent in Bombay a year or two before, four had actually been spent in jail for pushing a Parsee into the gutter one night and robbing him of his coat and gold-rimmed spectacles and some rupees in cash. His finger prints (although, to do him justice, he did not know this) were therefore on record in Phillaur. So when, as a result of the great to-do which followed the loss of the mare, her possession was traced to Lalu, he, in trying to show the bona-fides of his purchase, actually gave away the whole show, for "Sul

tana's "thumb mark was shown by the experts to be Ahmad's, and so three more victims of a satanic bureaucracy went for a space from the midst of their fellows.

Mr Isemonger, now head of the Punjab Criminal Investigation Department, started an album when he held charge of the bureau, in which he wrote up, and illustrated with photographs and prints, the most interesting of the cases which came to his knowledge. From its pages many good stories could be culled, but the limits of space (despite the idealist philosophers) are real and rigid, and so I must content myself with the tale of the simple Pathan and the wicked Maulvi.

In June 1911 a dead body was found in a water-cut in the Peshawar district, the body of a full-grown man, completely naked and lacking the head. The local police took its finger impressions and sent them to Phillaur, where they were found to be those of one Saifullah, who had been convicted of theft in 1899. On hearing this, the Peshawar Police made inquiries at Saifullah's home, and found that a few weeks earlier he had gone with his daughter to pay a visit to his spiritual adviser, a well-known maulvi. The latter, the police discovered, fell in love with the girl, much to her father's wrath, as she was very young. So the maulvi decided to murder him, and, accompanied by two profes

day to a neighbouring watercourse on the pretext of carrying up from thence some logs of wood. There the assassins accomplished their task, and, to make identification impossible as they thought, cut off their victim's head. But the Peshawar Police had got their clue from the bureau, and they stuck to it like bulldogs until they brought the three murderers to the gallows.

As I look through my notes, I see case after case which make the threadbare truism concerning fact and fiction to look almost like a brilliantly original epigram. There is the tale of the queer-shaped shoes and the doubtful finger print in a shopkeeper's register, which together led to the hanging of two men for a murder committed in a desolate ravine in an untrodden part of the Jhelum district. There is the story of the too-clever postman, who, turning to criminal uses the knowledge of finger prints which he had acquired as a warder in the Andamans, found his cleverness outmatched by the men of Phillaur. sad tale of the uxorious Ibrahim Gul of Peshawar, his dastardly father-in-law, and his faithful brother strikes a note rarely heard in official reports. These, and many other fragments of experience, grim, revolting, dramatic, or humorous, are thrown up from time to time by the widespread sea of life which

The

I claim to have made good my boast that the Phillaur Bureau is an amalgam of hard efficiency and thrilling romance, of drudgery and high adventure, and I have shown something of the part which it plays in the work of that mighty and far from soulless organism, the Indian Administration. And now for not the least remarkable feature in this proud achievement of the Punjab Police. The total cost of the Phillaur Bureau's upkeep is a bare three thousand pounds a year. For the Punjab Police believe, with Cicero, that magnum vectigal est parsimonia, and staff and expenditure are pruned to the sap. And more! The work which the bureau does for the neighbouring provinces of Delhi, Balochistan, and the frontier brings in a steady revenue each year, whilst much more is earned by its work in civil cases which I have already described. The final cost, then, to the Punjab Government of this, one of the greatest and best of all fingerprint bureaux in the whole world, is not much more than one thousand pounds a year.