ng amongst the ruins. For a few moments, their moving shadows were
thrown upon the moonlit ground; then they disappeared behind some
fragments of broken wall.

At the instant when the large stone resumed its place and level, the
heads of many other soldiers might have been seen lying close in the
excavation. The half-caste, the Indian, and the negro, still seated
thoughtfully in the hut, did not perceive what was passing.

[6] The following are some passages from the Count de Warren's very
curious book, "British India in 1831:" "Besides the robbers, who kill for
the sake of the booty they hope to find upon travellers, there is a class
of assassins, forming an organized society, with chiefs of their own, a
slang-language, a science, a free-masonry, and even a religion, which has
its fanaticism and its devotion, its agents, emissaries, allies, its
militant forces, and its passive adherents, who contribute their money to
the good work. This is the community of the Thugs or Phansegars
(deceivers or stranglers, from thugna, to deceive, and phansna, to
strangle), a religious and economical society, which speculates with the
human race by exterminating men; its origin is lost in the night of ages.

"Until 1810 their existence was unknown, not only to the European
conquerors, but even to the native governments. Between the years 1816
and 1830, several of their bands were taken in the act, and punished: but
until this last epoch, all the revelations made on the subject by
officers of great experience, had appeared too monstrous to obtain the
attention or belief of the public; they had been rejected and despised as
the dreams of a heated imagination. And yet for many years, at the very
least for half a century, this social wound had been frightfully on the
increase, devouring the population from the Himalayas to Cape Comorin and
from Cutch to Assam.

"It was in the year 1830 that the revelations of a celebrated chief,
whose life was spared on condition of his denouncing his accomplices,
laid bare the whole system. The basis of the Thuggee Society is a
religious belief--the worship of Bowanee, a gloomy divinity, who is only
pleased with carnage, and detests above all things the human race. Her
most agreeable sacrifices are human victims, and the more of these her
disciple may have offered up in this world the more he will be
recompensed in the next by all the delights of soul and sense, by women
always beautiful, and joys etern