prepare for its descent upon Hindostan. The Afghans were tribes of
hardy mountaineers, inhabiting a wild and thinly-peopled country. They
consisted of soldiers, husbandmen, and shepherds, all convertible, at
a moment's notice, into thieves and bandits; and through their
formidable defiles flowed an uncertain stream of commerce, connecting
India with the distant provinces of Persia and Russia. So little was
known of these mountaineers, that in the early part of this century,
their prince, Shah Zemaun, was a formidable bugbear to the Indian
Council, and nothing was thought of for a time but an invasion of the
Afghans. In one of the sudden revolutions, however, so common in
semi-barbarous states, this shah was taken captive, and his eyes
punctured with a lancet--a summary act of deposition in the East, for
a blind man cannot reign. Two of his brothers competed for the vacant
throne; and notwithstanding the efforts of a famous king-making
vizier, Futteh Khan, the prize fell for a time to the lot of him who
is so well known to English readers by the name and style of Shah
Soojah. But his incapacity was soon manifest. Sometimes a king,
sometimes a bandit, and sometimes a fugitive subsisting by the sale of
his jewels, his cause at length became altogether hopeless; and after
being robbed of his last treasure, the Koh-i-Noor--as has already been
detailed in this Journal[2]--he took refuge in the British territory.

Futteh Khan, the king-making vizier, had twenty brothers; but one of
the younger fry he treated with especial neglect. 'The son of a woman
of the Kuzzilbash tribe, looked down upon by the high-bred Douranee
ladies of his father's household, the boy had begun life in the
degrading office of a sweeper at the sacred cenotaph of Lamech.
Permitted, at a later period, to hold a menial office about the person
of the powerful Wuzeer, he served the great man with water, or bore
his pipe; was very zealous in his ministrations; kept long and painful