ing to twenty inches, which is very unusual so late in the season, and a good deal of this fell on the high mountains which we had just left, in the form of snow, covering the Kanchenjunga range down to 17,000 feet and lying lower on the Cho-là range. On the 29th October I packed off all my things to Calcutta by the Government bullock train and said good-bye to all my friends with much regret. I rode down to Siligori, where I found the grass fourteen to twenty feet high and a good deal of the country flooded.
Colonel Haughton had sent an elephant from Jelpigori, as the country was impassable for any other animal on account of the flooded state of the rivers, and it took me the whole night to get over the distance in a very uncomfortable manner, as I became so sleepy that I had to tie myself on the pad for fear of falling off into the water, On this night I probably got the germs of a fever which attacked me afterwards in Assam, where I accompanied Colonel Haughton during his tour of inspection, and which almost completely destroyed my memory of the events which happened during that tour. I find in my collection a pair of eggs of the white-headed eagle, Haliætus leucocephalus, marked u "H.J.E. ipse," but though my memory of similar events is usually very clear, I have not the least re¬ collection of how or where I got them.
When I returned to Calcutta I met the late A.O. Hume, who was then the premier ornithologist in India, and who was very anxious to go through and describe my new birds, I allowed him to borrow a few, which I never saw again until the whole of his immense collection was presented to the British Museum, Among them was a new species of Crake, of which Hume says in Hume and Marshall's Game Birds of India, ii,: "Elwes's Crake, Porzana bicolor Walden. At the close of 1870 I picked out a bird of this species from a collection made in Sikkim by Captain H.J. Elwes, Unfortunately the box containing this and other valuable skins from Assam was mislaid and never turned up for years, when it was found among other property in the Agra Custom House. In the meantime I received a second specimen from Mr, Mandelli and at once described it, naming it after its discoverer, I sent the description to the Ibis, but the editor, instead of publishing it, put it aside for seven or eight months, and only remembered it when Lord Walden, who in the meantime had received a third specimen, described it (Stray Feathers, iii., p. 283, 1875), as Porzana bicolor. Thus the name of the real discoverer is lost sight of, and it is only in the trivial name that this can now be preserved. Little is known of its distribution. Elsewhere it has only been met with in the Khasia hills, where Godwin Austen was the first to find it. It has been classed by Blanford in Fauna of British India, iv., p. 171, in the genus Amaurornis.”
Though at the time we started I had no previous acquaintance with Blanford, whose education and previous associations had been very different, and whose ideas were at that time very different in many points from my own, I found him an admirable travelling companion and never had a word of dissension during the ten weeks during which we lived together, under very trying conditions, in a very small tent. I renewed the friendship that we then formed when he retired from the service afterwards
