mes soured in
temper, and wantonly attacks the passing canoes.--_Travels in South
Africa_, p. 231.]

They spend their nights in marauding, often about the dwellings of men,
destroying their plantations, trampling down their gardens, and
committing serious ravages in rice grounds and young coco-nut
plantations. Hence from their closer contact with man and his dwellings,
these outcasts become disabused of many of the terrors which render the
ordinary elephant timid and needlessly cautious; they break through
fences without fear; and even in the daylight a _rogue_ has been known
near Ambogammoa to watch a field of labourers at work in reaping rice,
and boldly to walk in amongst them, seize a sheaf from the heap, and
retire leisurely to the jungle. By day they generally seek concealment,
but are frequently to be met with prowling about the by-roads and jungle
paths, where travellers are exposed to the utmost risk from their savage
assaults. It is probable that this hostility to man is the result of the
enmity engendered by those measures which the natives, who have a
constant dread of their visits, adopt for the protection of their
growing crops. In some districts, especially in the low country of
Badulla, the villagers occasionally enclose their cottages with rude
walls of earth and branches to protect them from nightly assaults. In
places infested by them, the visits of European sportsmen to the
vicinity of their haunts are eagerly encouraged by the natives, who
think themselves happy in lending their services to track the ordinary
herds in consideration of the benefit conferred on the village
communities by the destruction of a rogue. In 1847 one of these
formidable creatures frequented for some months the Rangbodde Pass on
the great mountain road leading to the sanatarium, at Neuera-ellia; and
amongst other excesses, killed a Caffre belonging to the corps of Caffre
pioneers, by seizing him with its trunk and beating him to death against
the bank.

To return to the herd: one member of it, usually the largest and most
powerful, is by common consent implicitly followed as leader. A tusker,
if there be one in the party, is generally observed to be the commander;
but a female, if of superior energy, is as readily obeyed as a male. In
fact, in this promotion there is no reason to doubt that supremacy is
almost unconsciously assumed by those endowed with superior vigour and
courage rather than from the accidental possession