offered up with as much noise as possible, and with good effect, for the disease was found to give way from that moment.  About six years before, when great numbers were dying in his own little capital of Pithoria[3] from a similar epidemic, he had, he said, tried the same thing with still greater effect; but, on that occasion, he had the aid of a man very learned in such matters.  This man caused a small carriage to be made up after a plan of his own, for a pair of scape-goats, which were harnessed to it, and driven during the ceremonies to a wood some distance from the town, where they were let loose.  From that hour the disease entirely ceased in the town.  The goats never returned.  ‘Had they come back,’ said Sarimant, ’the disease must have come back with them; so he took them a long way into the wood—­indeed (he believed), the man, to make sure of them, had afterwards caused them to be offered up as a sacrifice to the shrine of Hardaul Lala, in that very wood.  He had himself never seen a puja (religious ceremony) so entirely and immediately efficacious as this, and much of its success was, no doubt, attributable to the science of the man who planned the carriage, and himself drove the pair of goats to the wood.  No one had ever before heard of the plan of a pair of scape-goats being driven in a carriage; but it was likely (he thought) to be extensively adopted in future.’[4]

Sarimant’s man of affairs mentioned that when Lord Hastings took the field against the Pindharis, in 1817,[5] and the division of the grand army under his command was encamped near the grove in Bundelkhand, where repose the ashes of Hardaul Lala, under a small shrine, a cow was taken into this grove to be converted into beef for the use of the Europeans.  The priest in attendance remonstrated, but in vain—­the cow was killed and eaten.  The priest complained, and from that day the cholera morbus broke out in the camp; and from this central point it was, he said, generally understood to have spread all over India.[6] The story of the cow travelled at the same time, and the spirit of Hardaul Lala was everywhere supposed to be riding in the whirlwind, and directing the storm.  Temples were everywhere erected, and offerings made to appease him; and in six years after, he had himself seen them as far as Lahore, and in almost every village throughout the whole course of his journey to that distant capital and back.  He is one of the most sensible and freely spoken men that I have met with.  ‘Up to within the last few years’, added he, ’the spirit of Hardaul Lala had been propitiated only in cases of cholera morbus; but now he is supposed to preside over all kinds of epidemic diseases, and offerings have everywhere been made to his shrine during late influenzas.’[7]

‘This of course arises’, I observed, ’from the industry of his priests, who are now spread all over the country; and you know that there is hardly a village or hamlet in which there are not some of them to be found subsisting upon the fears of the people.’