Again mounting his horse, he pressed rapidly on to Laon, where he arrived at four o'clock in the afternoon. Here he dispatched various orders, and sent a frank and honest bulletin to Paris, concealing nothing of the measurelessness of the calamity. "Here," said he to General Druot, "is the bulletin of Waterloo. I wish you to hear it read. If I have omitted any essential circumstances, you will remind me of them. It is not my intention to conceal any thing. Now, as after the affair of Moscow, the whole truth must be disclosed to France. I might have thrown on Marshal Ney the blame of part of the misfortunes at Waterloo. But the mischief is done. No more must be said." After a few hours of unrefreshing and troubled slumber, the Emperor entered a carriage, and, accompanied by a few friends and a feeble escort, drove all the day, and just after midnight on the morning of the 21st arrived in Paris. It was a dark and gloomy hour. The street lamps were flickering and expiring. With characteristic propriety, instead of directing his steps to the Tuileries, he modestly turned aside to the less ambitious palace of the Elysée. A few servants were at the gate of the palace with glimmering torches. He was received upon the steps by his faithful | friend Caulaincourt Fatigue and grief had prostrated him into the last stage of exhaustion. His cheek was emaciate and pallid, and his dress disordered by travel. His tottering limbs could hardly support his steps, and his head drooped upon his shoulder. Throwing himself upon a sofa, he exclaimed, pressing his hand upon his heart, "I am suffocating here. The army has performed prodigies of valor. It is grievous to think that we should have been overcome after so many heroic efforts. My most brilliant victories do not shed more glory on the French army than the defeat at Waterloo. Our troops have not been beaten; they have been sacrificed, massacred by overwhelming numbers. My Guard suffered themselves to be cut to pieces without asking for quarter; but they exclaimed to me, 'Withdraw! withdraw! You see that death is resolved to spare your Majesty.' And opening their ranks, my old grenadiers screened me from the carnage by forming around me a rampart of their own bodies. My brave, my admirable Guard has been destroyed, and I have not perished with them." He paused, overcome by anguish, and heaving a deep sigh, and saying, "I desire to be alone," retired to the silence and the solitude of his cabinet. for the purpose of studying the botany of those sterile regions. After his return he looked about him for fresh worlds to conquer. For a while he hesitated between the Andes and the Himalayas; but finally decided upon the latter. Three years were spent by him among these mountains, the loftiest upon the globe, and the results of his explorations are embodied in a couple of handsome VALLEY OF TAMBUR AMONG THE HIMALAYAS. volumes, which have been received with great favor by the scientific world. With the purely scientific portions of the work, we do not intend to meddle. But intermingled with these are many pictures of life and manners which it seems to us can not fail to prove interesting to the general reader. The expedition was undertaken partly under the auspices of the British Government, who appropriated a sum of money to aid in defraying the expenses, and likewise furnished many other facilities for the prosecution of the learned Doctor's researches. His attendants and assistants were numerous, amounting often to fifty or sixty persons. We will therefore, for the occasion, appoint ourselves as honorary members of the expedition, and accompany our respected principal on his travels. We leave Calcutta in January, 1848. Our most direct way would be to ascend the Ganges for a couple of hundred miles, which would bring us within sight of the Himalayan range, at a distance of fifty leagues. But our naturalist leader wishes to make a preliminary exploration of a tract lying far to the west of our direct route; so we set off overland. Public conveyances are unknown, and we travel, as every body else does, by a palkee or palanquin. A very pleasant and commodious mode of journeying this appears to one unaccustomed to it. The traveler has nothing to do but to stretch himself out at lazy length in a kind of bier, and be borne along upon men's shoulders. But a few days' experience is sufficient to make one long to exchange the palkee for the Himalayan Journals; or, Notes of a Naturalist in Bengal, the Sikkim and Nepaul Himalayas, the Khasia Mountains, etc. By JOSEPH DALTON HOOKER, M.D., R.N., F.R.S. uneasy jolt of camel-riding. The mahouts, or drivers, it is said, never reach an advanced age, their life is jolted out of them in a few years. They are not unfrequently afflicted with spinal diseases caused by the perpetual motion imparted of the animal absorbs the rays of the sun, till we seem to be sitting on a sheet of hot iron. He has likewise an unpleasant habit of blowing water over his parched skin, and his rider not seldom comes in for an untimely shower-bath of very questionable purity. The mahout, seated upon the animal's neck, guides him by poking his toes under one of the great flapping ears, as he wishes rudest vehicle tugged over the roughest of cordu- | perpetual swinging motion, which in a few hours roy roads. You travel chiefly by night, and at becomes absolutely distressing, worse than the the end of every stage you are awakened by your bearers letting you down with a jerk; and then, thrusting their flaming torches in your drowsy eyes, they ask imploringly for bucksheesh—that word so familiar to all Eastern travelers. If you have made it a point to "remember the coach-to the vertebral column. The huge black back man" when bowling over the beautiful English roads, have given "pour boire" to French postillions, "Trinkgelt" to German Postknechten, and "buona mana" to Italian vetturini, you can not, of course, be hard-hearted enough to turn a deaf ear to the petition of these lean swarthy fellows who in their own persons have acted the part both of coachman and horses. You set off again with a fresh relay, but somehow your new bear-him to turn to the right or the left. He carries ers can not get rightly to work until you have been roused from your uneasy slumbers, rubbed your eyes, and applied the universal quickener to their palms. Then, after all, you find that there are few things more wearisome than lying hour after hour stretched out in your low, narrow palkee. If the blinds are closed you are stifled with the heat, if they are open you are smothered with dust. You are at times half inclined, by way of experiment, to alight and change places with one of your bearers, convinced that any alteration in your position must be for the better. a huge iron goad with which to enforce obedience. With the butt end he hammers away upon the animal's head, with force enough to crack a cocoa-nut or even the obdurate skull of a negro; or drives the pointed end through the thick skin down to the very quick, leaving great punctures through which the blood and yellow fat ooze out in the broiling sun, occasioning us some disagreeable qualms till we get used to it. There is one advantage which, however, goes far to compensate for these annoyances: the height of the beast elevates his rider far above the dust. One morning, just at sunrise, we behold a fine conical mountain drawn sharply up against the clear gray sky. It is the sacred hill of Parasnath, so called after one of the Hindoo deities who became incarnate and abode for a hundred years at Benares. After his death he was interred on the summit of this mountain, which thus became a sacred spot. His worshipers, the "Jains," are very numerous; their principal object of adoration being the blessed foot of their deity. His worship appears to be in a flourishing condition, judging from the number and ex We pass numerous straggling villages, or rather collections of hovels, nestling among mango and fig trees, with feathery palms floating over their roofs. Water-tanks form a prominent feature in the landscape, often white with water lilies. As we advance farther into the hill country, we enter a sterile tract, covered with stunted grass. We encounter travelers in numbers; most of them are pilgrims bound for the sacred temple of Juggernaut. The greater part are on foot, though here and there we see one of the rude vehicles of the country, drawn by oxen. Here is an old man borne along in the arms of his kin-cellent condition of the temples. Beggars, of dred. He wishes to behold Juggernaut before he dies, and then he will depart in peace. What a different nunc dimittis is his from that uttered by the aged Simeon when he held in his withered arms the Desire of Ages. course, abound in their neighborhood-the lame, the halt, the blind, and deformed, but above all, those suffering from the horrible diseases of leprosy and elephantiasis. We make our way still further into the hill courThe Ganges is the great highway for the com- try, where the roads become almost impassable. merce of India, and we sec but little merchandise Our luggage is hauled along upon bullock carts, upon our inland route. A few wagons drag along behind which an elephant pushes with his forethe cotton of the upper country; it is clumsily head, while the oxen drag in front. At last the packed in rotten bags, and is hardly worth trans- patient creature's head becomes so sore with pushporting to market. The most thriving branch of ing that he can push no longer, and we are not business seems to be the traffic in the holy waters seldom sorely put to it to advance. In the steepof the Ganges, hawked about by wandering deal-er places we fasten eight or ten oxen to a single ers for the benefit of those who can not visit the purifying stream. The farther they recede from the river, the more precious and costly is the water; and when their jars run low, what should hinder them from replenishing them from any other stream? It would require a nice analysis to distinguish the genuine from the counterfeit article. In the mean time, we have exchanged our palkee for the more magnificent conveyance of an elephant. The huge beast sways along with a wagon, and at the rear of each we station a driver. At a preconcerted signal each seizes the tail of an ox, and gives it a violent wrench. The poor beasts give a simultaneous start, and the wagon is tugged up the crest of the declivity. Unluckily it sometimes happens that one of the beasts, in his torture, breaks out of the line, at the imminent risk of overturning the vehicle. When we come to a river which we must cross, we skirt along it till we find a shallow place; then packing our baggage on our elephants, we get it over, our bullock carts getting across as they best can. It is a hot, unpleasant journey altogether. Our skins peel with the heat and dryness of the atmosphere, our nails crack, while all our implements of wood and tortoise-shell become as brittle as glass, and are fractured by the slightest blow. ter pleased to have been experimenting on our necks instead of our arms. He regarded us with such a look as quaint old Izaak Walton might have given his writhing victim just as he was impaling him on his hook, "gently as though he loved him." These gentle stranglers had favorite stations all through the country-lonely spots We come upon the Ganges at Mirzapore, a among the jungle where some tree or well made great town with a hundred thousand inhabitants. a favorite halting-place for travelers. Here they Here is the main establishment for the suppres- would encounter a stranger, seat themselves cossion of the numerous gangs of robbers, poisoners, ily by his side, enter into confidential discourse and murderers who until within less than a score with him, in the midst of which the fatal cord of years infested the whole country. One of the would be wound about his neck. A vigorous "Thugs," who has been admitted as "approver," pull or two, and all is over. Of these favorite or government witness, is introduced to us. He stations there were 274 in the little kingdom of is as mild-looking a man as you would wish to Oude, a territory 170 miles long by 100 broad. meet; but born and bred to his pleasant profes- They looked upon these stations precisely as the sion, he never thinks of looking upon it as any gentle Izaak regarded some quiet reach of the thing but a perfectly reputable one. The Doctor, Thames, where he was always reasonably sure who is something of a phrenologist, examines of a fish or two. During the half score of years his head, and finds the organ of "destructiveness" previous to 1835, more than 1500 Thugs were aplargely developed. At our request, the Thug lets prehended, of whom some 400 were hanged and us into some of the secrets of his profession. He twice as many transported. Their murders were takes off his linen girdle, and slipping it around numbered by thousands every year; how many our arm, shows us the peculiar turn with which thousands no man knows. Of a gang numbering they strangle their victims; he does this with the a score, one member confessed to having been in same self-satisfied air with which some old at the death of 931 persons, while the least emisalt" will show some intricate knot to a "green- nent of his associates had assisted in taking off horn." We could not help thinking that our four-and-twenty. The victims were mostly travmild-looking friend would have been all the bet-elers from distant parts of the country, for whom 64 a species of flying bug that makes its way under our clothing. Try to remove one of them, and he resents the liberty by emitting an odor tenfold more nauseous than that of our familiar "boarding-house companion." no inquiries were ever made. Major Sleeman, | duce an unpleasant irritation. Worse than all is the officer at the head of the establishment for the suppression of the Thugs, states that he was for three years in charge of a district which was a favorite spot with them. He supposed that nothing took place there without his hearing of it; but he subsequently learned that during that time one hundred people had been murdered and buried within a quarter of a mile from his residence. These "gentle Hindoos" can upon occasion do very ferocious things. 66 From Mirzapore we drop down the Ganges, past the holy city of Benares, with its crumbling temples and narrow, filthy streets. The images of the sacred bulls and the obscene symbols of the Hindoo faith, of all shapes and sizes, are the most prominent objects in this Athens of India." Ghazepore, fifty miles further, is famous for the tomb of Lord Cornwallis, who regained in India the laurels he lost in America. Here are the celebrated gardens of roses from which is produced the finest attar of roses. The weight of a half-dollar of the first quality of this perfume costs fifty dollars; to produce this quantity requires twenty thousand flowers. At Patna we stop to visit the opium godowns, or stores. The production of this drug in all its stages is a monopoly of the East India Company. No one can cultivate the poppy without a special license, and the Company purchase all produce at certain fixed rates. The opium is delivered to collectors, who transmit it to Patna, where it is prepared for market. The operation is carried on in a large paved room, where the drug is first flung into great vats. The workmen are all ticketed. Each has before him a table upon which is a little basin of opium and a brass cup. By his side is a box of poppy leaves. His business is to make the drug up into round balls of a specified weight, for which purpose the cup is used, and to cover them neatly with the leaves. At night he deposits his balls in a rack bearing a number corresponding to his own. They are then placed separately in a cup of clay, and conveyed to a drying room, where they are carefully watched by little urchins who creep about among the racks. Their special mission is to keep away a species of So we float down the sacred stream. It is here four or five miles broad, and is covered with boats of all forms and dimensions, among which we now and then see a square-built steamer puff-weevil, who are as fond of the sedative drug as ing along, tugging huge passenger-barges. Upon the shore at frequent intervals we see the rotting charpoy, or bedstead, once occupied by some devotee who has been brought to die upon the banks of the holy river. Now and then the disgusting form of a huge aligator is seen basking in the sun, or a pariah dog making his meal from a corpse flung upon the silent shore. Sundry annoyances try us on board our boat. Flies and mosquitoes abound of course. Great spider webs as large as fine thread float in the air, and when inhaled pro John Chinaman himself. But as our friend of the pigtail has money, while the weevil has none, he of course gets the preference. In fact the distinction goes further. John Bull shoots the Chinaman if he does not take the opium, and kills the weevil if he does. A good workman makes thirty or forty of these narcotic balls a day. During a season nearly a million and a half of balls are manufactured here for the Chinese market alone. Great care is taken to prevent the smallest loss of the drug. Each workman undergoes a thorough |