Erratum.

Page 116, line 5, FOR A.D. 1612, READ A.D. 1619.




"Who has not heard of the Vale of Cashmere,
With its roses the brightest that earth ever gave,
Its temples, and grottoes, and fountains as clear
As the love-lighted eyes that hang over their wave?"




Introduction.

More than a year and a half had been spent in the hottest parts of the
plains of India, and another dreaded hot season was rapidly making its
approach, when, together with a brother officer, I applied for and
obtained six months' leave of absence for the purpose of travelling
in Cashmere and the Himalayas, otherwise called by Anglo-Indians
"The Hills."

We had been long enough in the country to have discovered that the
gorgeous East of our imagination, as shadowed forth in the delectable
pages of the "Arabian Nights," had little or no connexion with the
East of our experience -- the dry and dusty East called India, as it
appeared, wasted and dilapidated, in its first convalescence from the