I used in the season to send a small Bhuttia boy to gather the fruit. One day he found a large monkey there before him. It attacked him savagely and I was obliged to shoot it to save him from its fury.

A hundred feet above my house and on the left of the road stood in a terraced garden the Officers' Mess, occupied by my subaltern and the doctor. And three hundred feet higher still was the last building in Buxa, the Circuit House, intended as a court-house and temporary residence for any civil official who should chance to come there on duty. The three white square towers, which stood on the spurs running down from Sinchula were known as the Picquet Towers, and, conspicuous against the dark mountains could be seen for many miles from the plains below. They were intended to contain in war time small parties of the garrison and hold points which commanded the fort at close range. From one above the east face of the fort even arrows could be shot into the interior of our defences; so its possession was a necessity to us. They were strongly built of stone and loopholed, the door eight feet from the ground, and reached by a ladder, windowless, the only light coming from the loopholes. To the west of the fort beyond the mountain road and behind another spur, was the bazaar or native town, which consisted of a dozen wooden huts, and three or four brick houses, in which lived the few bunniahs or merchants who resided there to trade grain, salt, and cloth, with the Bhutanese across the border. There were hardly thirty natives in the bazaar, comprising our whole civil population. The "shops" in the one tiny street contained little of use, even for our sepoys' frugal needs, and nothing for ours; so that anything we required had to be sent for from Calcutta—a day and a night by train.