ation in a measure ungeneral.
India had eighty languages, and more custom-houses than cats. No clever
man with the instinct of a highway robber could fail to notice what a
chance for business was here offered. India was full of clever men with
the highwayman instinct, and so, quite naturally, the brotherhood of the
Thugs came into being to meet the long-felt want.

How long ago that was nobody knows-centuries, it is supposed. One of the
chiefest wonders connected with it was the success with which it kept its
secret. The English trader did business in India two hundred years and
more before he ever heard of it; and yet it was assassinating its
thousands all around him every year, the whole time.

CHAPTER XLIV.

The old saw says, "Let a sleeping dog lie." Right.... Still, when there
is much at stake it is better to get a newspaper to do it.
--Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.

FROM DIARY:

January 28. I learned of an official Thug-book the other day. I was
not aware before that there was such a thing. I am allowed the temporary
use of it. We are making preparations for travel. Mainly the
preparations are purchases of bedding. This is to be used in sleeping
berths in the trains; in private houses sometimes; and in nine-tenths of
the hotels. It is not realizable; and yet it is true. It is a survival;
an apparently unnecessary thing which in some strange way has outlived
the conditions which once made it necessary. It comes down from a time
when the railway and the hotel did not exist; when the occasional white
traveler went horseback or by bullock-cart, and stopped over night in the
small dak-bungalow provided at easy distances by the government--a
shelter, merely, and nothing more. He had to carry bedding along, or do
without. The dwellings of the English residents are spacious and
comfortable and commodiously furnished, and surely it must be an odd
sight to see half a dozen guests come filing into such a place and
dumping blankets and pillows here and there and everywhere. But custom
makes incongruous things congruous.

One buys the bedding, with waterproof hold-all for it at almost any shop
--there is no difficulty about it.

January 30. What a spectacle the railway station was, at train-time! It
was a very large station, yet when we arrived it seemed as if the whole
world was present--half of it inside, the other half outside, and both
halves, bearing