e thinking of sirloin or rumpsteak. But the
absurdity of a panther being found in such a region outweighed all this
and I scoffed.

I was yet to learn a lesson in humility out of this adventure. Two years
later I sailed over the bar and dropped anchor at the same spot. I was
met with the intelligence that on the previous evening two panthers had
been seen sitting on the brow of the hill and gazing at the beauties of
the fading sunset, as wild beasts are so fond of doing. A night or two
later a cow was attacked in a neighbouring field, and, staggering into
the village, fell down and died in a narrow alley between two houses.
The panther followed and prowled about all night, but the villagers,
hammering at their doors with sticks, scared it from its meal.

I at once had a nest put up in a small tree, and took my position in it
at sunset. The common people in India do not waste much money on lamp
oil, preferring to sleep during the hours appointed by Nature for the
purpose, so it was not long before all doors were securely barred and
quietness reigned. Then the mosquitoes awoke and came to inquire for me,
the little bats (how I blessed them!) wheeled about my head, the
night-jar called to his fellow, and the little owls sat on a branch
together and talked to each other about me. Hour after hour passed, and
it became too dark in that narrow alley to see a panther if it had come.
So I came down and got to my boat. The panther was engaged a mile away
dining on another cow! On further inquiry I learned that there was some
good forest a day's journey distant, and it was quite the fashion among
the panthers of that place to spend a weekend occasionally at a spot so
full of all delights as this dark, jungle-smothered fort.

XIV

THE PURBHOO

I do not believe that the Member of Parliament who moved the adjournment
of the House to consider the culpable carelessness of the Government of
India in allowing the Rajah of Muttighur to fall into the moat of his
own castle when he was drunk, could have told you what a Purbhoo is, not
though you had spelled it Prabhu, so that he could find it in his
_Gazetteer_. Of course he saw hundreds of them during that Christmas
which he spent in the East before he wrote his book; but then he took
them all for Brahmins. He never noticed that the curve of their turbans
was not the same, and the idol mark on their foreheads was quite
different, nor even that their shoes were not forked at th