Her parents were
pleased to find she had forgotten all her foolishness for young
Strickland and said she was a good girl.
Strickland vows that the two months of his service were the most
rigid mental discipline he has ever gone through. Quite apart from
the little fact that the wife of one of his fellow-saises fell in
love with him and then tried to poison him with arsenic because he
would have nothing to do with her, he had to school himself into
keeping quiet when Miss Youghal went out riding with some man who
tried to flirt with her, and he was forced to trot behind carrying
the blanket and hearing every word! Also, he had to keep his
temper when he was slanged in "Benmore" porch by a policeman--
especially once when he was abused by a Naik he had himself
recruited from Isser Jang village--or, worse still, when a young
subaltern called him a pig for not making way quickly enough.
But the life had its compensations. He obtained great insight into
the ways and thefts of saises--enough, he says, to have summarily
convicted half the chamar population of the Punjab if he had been
on business.
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