courts, but failed to upset the commission's finding, and the
Privy Council upheld the Indian judgment. Thereupon in a flowery
and eloquent document he laid his case before the Viceroy, and
was told that the matter was closed. Now Ram Singh came of a
fighting stock, so he straightway took ship to England to
petition the Crown. He petitioned Parliament, but his petition
went into the bag behind the Speaker's chair, from which there is
no return. He petitioned the King, but was courteously informed
that he must approach the Department concerned. He tried the
Secretary of State for India, and had an interview with Abinger
Vennard, who was very rude to him, and succeeded in mortally
insulting the feudal aristocrat. He appealed to the Prime
Minister, and was warned off by a harassed private secretary.
The handful of members of Parliament who make Indian grievances
their stock-in-trade fought shy of him, for indeed Ram Singh's
case had no sort of platform appeal in it, and his arguments were
flagrantly undemocratic. But they sent him to Lord Caerlaverock,
for the ex-viceroy loved to be treated as a kind of
consul-general for India. But this Protector of the Poor proved
a broken reed. He told Ram Singh flatly that he was a belated
feudalist, which was true; and implied that he was a
land-grabber, which was not true, Ram Singh having only enjoyed
the fruits of his fore-bears' enterprise. Deeply incensed, the
appellant shook the dust of Caerlaverock House from his feet, and
sat down to plan a revenge upon the Government which had wronged
him. And in his wrath he thought of the heirloom of his house,
the drug which could change men's souls.

It happened that Lord Caerlaverock cook's came from the same
neighbourhood as Ram Singh. This cook, Lal Muhammad by name, was