about six in the
morning
On enquiring how these Topes or groves came to grow in places so far distant from any other cultivation , I was informed that they were planted by rich high caste natives , as a penance that was imposed upon them by the Brahmin priests for sins of omission or commission against their creed . By the way , I heard the other day a good story concerning these said Topes . It appears that a certain ensign of the Company 's service , who had been furnished with his commission and outfit by an elderly maiden aunt of a serious and pious turn of mind , whose positive injunctions to him on leaving England were that he was not to attempt to impose upon her with any account of dangers , difficulties , or surprising adventures that were not strictly true , for she hated liars , and would cut him out of her will if she detected him indulging in anything of the sort ; but requested that he would write to her a full , true and particular account of his first battle , should he be engaged in one . `` At the commencement of his first campaign he wrote to the old lady a long descriptive letter , but unfortunately he did not pay sufficient attention to his orthography , and so came to grief , for one paragraph of the letter ran thus : '' ` Our entire brigade , ten thousand strong , halted about six in the morning , and by seven the whole of the tents were snugly pitched , and we were taking our breakfast comfortably in the tops of trees which grew on both sides of the road . ' `` He spelt the word Topes without the capital or letter e. Tents for ten thousand men pitched in the tops of trees . Oh , was there ever such a monstrous falsehood , and the poor old lady fairly shook from head to foot with pious indignation . The letter was returned to the writer without remark or comment , and she was never again heard to mention the name of her nephew , and on her death , which occurred soon after , it was found that she had bequeathed the whole of her property to establish a mission for diffusing the Gospel truth among the natives of the Fiji Islands , and the unfortunate victim to bad spelling was left lamenting . ''