when, as General Ouchterlony wrote to me, he would otherwise have been obliged to order the battering-train from Agra.
"When I made my escape, as detailed, by swimming the Taptee, it was from the tender mercies of the gentle Brahman, our late pensioner Emurt Row's force, by whom I was then in close confinement, and not from Holkar.
"I fear I must divest my marriage with her highness the Begam of a great part of its romantic attraction, by confessing that the young Begam was only thirteen years of age when I first applied for and received her mother's consent; and which marriage probably saved both their lives. Allow me to assure you, on the very best authority, that a Moslem lady's marriage with a Christian, by a Cazee, is as legal in this country as if the ceremony had been performed by the Bishop of Calcutta; a point lately settled by my son's marriage with the niece of the Emperor, the Nuwab Mulka Humanee Begam; and that the respectability of the females of my family amongst the natives of Hindostān has been settled by the Emperor many years ago, he having adopted my wife as his daughter; a ceremony satisfactorily repeated by the Queen, on a visit to my own house in Delhi. I can assure my partial sketcher, that my only daughter died in 1804, and that my grand-daughters, by the particular desire of their grandmother, are Christians. It was an act of her own, as by the marriage agreement, the daughters were to be brought up in the religion of the mother; the sons in that of your
"Very obedient, humble servant,
"W. L. G."
"Khasgunge, 5th March, 1835."
Colonel Tod, in a letter to the editor of "the Asiatic Journal," thus speaks of Colonel Gardner:—"A day or two previous to this number (of your journal) being lent me, an intimate friend of Colonel Gardner's spent the evening with me; and as it is almost impossible that any two men, at all acquainted with his diversified life, could talk of him without expressing a wish that he would become his own biographer,—the subject being started,
