The natives all maintained still that their cow had been killed by a panther, saying that the hyaena had come on the second night, after their manner, to fill its base belly with the leavings.  And there was some circumstantial evidence in favour of this view.  In the first place, I never heard of a hyaena having the audacity to attack a cow; in the second, the tooth-marks on the cow showed that it had been executed according to the tradition of all the great cats—­by seizing its throat and breaking its neck; and in the third, a hyaena, sitting down to such a meal, would certainly have begun with calf’s head and crunched up every bone of the skull before 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 the toes, but ended in a sharp point curled upwards.  And if he did not see these things which were on the surface, what could he know of matters that lie deeper?