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the appointed hour, I have already told your readers. Well, returning from the interview, I put down on paper the particulars of the interview and sent it to Mr Crawford with a letter to the effect; "I have noted down on another paper the particulars of the interview I had with you this morning. Please look through and let me know if I have omitted anything that you may like to be mentioned and oblige. If by Friday next I do not receive a reply I shall consider myself at liberty to send to the papers my account of the interview as being strictly faithful." And this elicited, mirabile dictu, an official document from the Extra Assistant Resident's Office informing me, in reply to my letter regarding the permission, that the application for permission would be placed before the Resident for orders. I could not for the life of me understand what the document meant, for I had never written to Mr. Crawford about the permission, the only letter written to him being the one asking for appointment in connection with it to which I had received a reply making an appointment. All this about the British authority's proceedings sounds so funny that, I am sure, your readers will enjoy the reading of it.
I told you in my last that the right of the Salar Jung family to the Meer Alum Tank, one of its coveted possessions, had been questioned by the present Minister on the flimsiest of grounds. The 'grounds' are worth noticing. The tank was constructed long ago by the Nawab Meer Alum, whose name it bears, not by public subscriptions but at his own cost. And if it came to be used by the public, it was thus. The Nawab Meer Alum, out of loyalty to his sovereign and consideration for his friends, allowed water to be drawn from the tank for the use of the Nizam and certain noblemen in the city. And later on when the people applied to him for permission to draw water from it for irrigating the fields underlying it, he was public-spirited and generous enough to grant the permission. In consideration of the good derived by the people from the tank, the Government of His Highness the Nizam ordered that its repair, whenever
