lishman shot him dead; and the boys had the novel experience of
inspecting at close quarters the body of a tiger who, not long before,
had been sheltering from the rays of the noonday sun in the same
thicket as themselves.

One Sunday a bullock-cart drew up at the Mission-house, containing a
large panther which had been shot, some eight or nine miles away, by a
Christian who is one amongst the few privileged natives allowed to
carry a gun. He was bringing the body in order to exhibit it to the
local authority, so that he might claim the Government reward. The
skin also fetches a good price. The scent was getting rather strong,
so after photographing the successful hunter and his son, standing
over the beast in the approved fashion, we were glad to hurry him on.
Its claws and teeth were in a very dirty and neglected condition,
which may partly account for the great danger of even slight
lacerations made by an animal of this kind.

Government sometimes spends as much as L8000 a year on rewards for the
destruction of wild beasts and snakes in British India, and the annual
return of the number of human beings reported as having been killed by
them shows that they are still sufficiently numerous to be a power in
the land. In a recent return this number reached the enormous total of
24,576. But snakes were accountable for 21,827 out of these deaths. In
the same year, in the case of 48 people killed by tigers in the
Central Provinces, nearly all were the victims of one tigress which
had been infesting the jungle for some years. A confirmed man-eater
becomes very crafty, and difficult to kill.

There are many hills and dales where wild beasts found a congenial
home from which they have gradually retreated in the face of man and
civilisation. A den in the hillside, visible from the Mission bungalow
at Yerandawana, is still spoken of as the "Tiger's den," and a remote,
but probably true tradition lingers of an immense tiger who lived
there and who was eventually hunted down and slain by order of the
then ruler of the district. At the present day, in the immediate
neighbourhood of Yerandawana the only wild creatures left are the fox
and the jackal, with an occasional hyena. Jackals visit the outskirts
of the village at night to see if there is anything eatable to be
picked up, and they sometimes race across the Mission compound in the
early morning on their way home. It is to be feared that they visit
the Hindu cemetery, where