Episodes in a life of adventure Author:Laurence Oliphant Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: a a CHAPTER III. MY FIRST EXPERIENCES IK DIPLOMACY. From Greece we went to Egypt, and spent a mouth on the Nile, finally riding across the desert to Sue... more »z by the route then supposed to have been the track of the Israelites—a theory which subsequent investigation has entirely exploded. By this time all idea of Cambridge had been given up, and I returned to Ceylon as my father's private secretary. Here I spent three years, devoting my time largely to sport as well as to law, my avocations and amusements enabling me to travel over the island pretty thoroughly. My residence here was further enlivened by the excitement incident on what was called a rebellion in the Kandyan Province—a very trumpery affair, to which I shall have occasion to refer later—and by an expedition which I made on the invitation of Jung IJahadoor, who spent a few days in Ceylon, and whom I subsequently accompanied to Nepaul. This visit into a little-known and most interesting country, and the trip through India which I afterwards made with the present Duke of Westminster, the Hon. Mr Leveson Gower, and the Hon. Captain, now Admiral Egerton, formed the subject of a book whichI published a year later in England. Meantime I had got called to the Ceylon bar, and had some curious legal experiences, not the least of which was that at the age of twenty- two I had been engaged in twenty-three murder cases. This success, and the desire I had to bring out my book, induced me to return to England for the purpose of being called to the English bar. While I was engaged in this very uninteresting operation, my journey to Nepaul was published by Murray, with such satisfactory results that 1 became bitten with a mania for authorship. The difficulty was to find something to write about: this I solved by deciding to go to ...« less