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Updated: June 20, 2025
It was about the year 1875, when I was a young Assistant Commissioner in the Punjab, that I was ordered to the small up-country station of Akalpur, and took possession of the Assistant Commissioner's bungalow there. On the night of our arrival in the bungalow, my wife and I had our charpoys light Indian bedsteads placed side by side in a certain room and went to bed.
We had a 'south-easter' for fourteen days, without an hour's lull; even the flag-ship had no communication with the shore for eight days. The good old naval surgeon there ordered me to start off for this high 'up-country' district, and arranged my departure for the first POSSIBLE day.
It is reassuring to witness the system and scrupulous cleanliness of every step employed in producing Ceylon tea. Anybody who has spent a day on an up-country estate is fairly certain to be friendly to Ceylon tea the rest of his life, for modern machinery does much of the work which in China and Japan is performed by hands none too clean and amid surroundings none too healthful.
Nobody seemed to have any tents when they left the station for the districts, nor to take any bedding when they went on tour or up-country. A queer, foreign land. But Monksmead was a most magnificent "bungalow" standing in a truly beautiful "compound" wherein the very bhistis and mallis were European and appeared to be second-class sahibs.
It is not suggested that the companies should not provide hospitals, the point is that having established a fund, which although nominally paid by the natives really has to be made up to them in wages, they were entitled to the benefit of that fund. The story is told of two up-country Boers who applied to the President for appointments, and received the reply, 'What can I do for you?
"No," he murmured presently, "I haven't time to motor up-country forty or fifty miles and place the call in some town where we are not known. It just isn't going to be possible to smother this miserable affair; sooner or later the lid is going to fly off, so I might as well be game and let the tail go with the hide. Oh, damn it, damn it!
At this confession of mine the up-country bride became extraordinarily arch on the subject of the well-known hospitality of steam yachts, and for this I was honestly grateful to her; but Juno brooded still. "I hope there is nothing wrong," she said solemnly.
A great friend of mine, an officer in Government service, went home not very long ago and married, and came out again to Burma with his wife. They settled down in a little up-country station. His duties were such as obliged him to go very frequently on tour far away from his home, and he would be absent ten days at a time or more.
These frontier folk, the people of the up-country, or back-country, who lived near and among the forest-clad mountains, far away from the long-settled districts of flat coast plain and sluggish tidal river, were known to themselves and to others as backwoodsmen.
To sum up briefly as follows: The Spanish surrendered in Santiago 12,000 men. We shipped from Santiago something over 14,000 men. The 2,000 additional were troops that came in from San Luis, Songo, and small up-country posts.
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