the place selected for the murder.  When near it, the fakeer came again.  Losing all patience with him, gave Mithoo, one of the gang, 5 rupees ($2.50) to murder him, and take the sin upon himself.  All four were strangled, including the fakeer.  Surprised to find among the fakeer’s effects 30 pounds of coral, 350 strings of small pearls, 15 strings of large pearls, and a gilt necklace.”

It it curious, the little effect that time has upon a really interesting circumstance.  This one, so old, so long ago gone down into oblivion, reads with the same freshness and charm that attach to the news in the morning paper; one’s spirits go up, then down, then up again, following the chances which the fakeer is running; now you hope, now you despair, now you hope again; and at last everything comes out right, and you feel a great wave of personal satisfaction go weltering through you, and without thinking, you put out your hand to pat Mithoo on the back, when —­puff! the whole thing has vanished away, there is nothing there; Mithoo and all the crowd have been dust and ashes and forgotten, oh, so many, many, many lagging years!  And then comes a sense of injury:  you don’t know whether Mithoo got the swag, along with the sin, or had to divide up the swag and keep all the sin himself.  There is no literary art about a government report.  It stops a story right in the most interesting place.

These reports of Thug expeditions run along interminably in one monotonous tune:  “Met a sepoy—­killed him; met 5 pundits—­killed them; met 4 Rajpoots and a woman—­killed them”—­and so on, till the statistics get to be pretty dry.  But this small trip of Feringhea’s Forty had some little variety about it.  Once they came across a man hiding in a grave —­a thief; he had stolen 1,100 rupees from Dhunroj Seith of Parowtee.  They strangled him and took the money.  They had no patience with thieves.  They killed two treasure-bearers, and got 4,000 rupees.  They came across two bullocks “laden with copper pice,” and killed the four drivers and took the money.  There must have been half a ton of it.  I think it takes a double handful of pice to make an anna, and 16 annas to make a rupee; and even in those days the rupee was worth only half a dollar.  Coming back over their tracks from Baroda, they had another picturesque stroke of luck:  “‘The Lohars of Oodeypore’ put a traveler in their charge for safety.”  Dear, dear, across this abyssmal gulf of time we still see Feringhea’s lips uncover his teeth, and through the dim haze we catch the incandescent glimmer of his smile.  He accepted that trust, good man; and so we know what went with the traveler.

Even Rajahs had no terrors for Feringhea; he came across an elephant-driver belonging to the Rajah of Oodeypore and promptly strangled him.

“A total of 100 men and 5 women murdered on this expedition.”

Among the reports of expeditions we find mention of victims of almost every quality and estate.