It was most amusing to hear the fat little Major relate the story.  He went through all the by-play incident to the piece, and as he got excited, stood right up on his narrow pad.  His gesticulations were most vehement, and as the elephant was rather unsteady, and his footing to say the least precarious, he seemed every moment as if he must topple over.  The old warrior, however, was equal to the occasion; without for an instant abating the vigour of his narrative, he would clutch at the greasy, matted locks of his mahout, and steady himself, while he volubly described incident after incident.  As he warmed with his subject, and tried to shew us how the tiger must have pounced on the man, he would let go and use his hands in illustration; the old elephant would give another heave, and the fat little man would make another frantic grab at the patient mahout’s hair.  The whole scene was most comical, and we were in convulsions of laughter.

The news, however, foreboded ample sport; we now had certain khubber of at least two tigers; we were soon under weigh; the wounded man had been sent back to the Major’s head-quarters on an elephant, and in time recovered completely from his mauling.  As we jogged along, we had a most interesting talk with the Major Capt[=a]n.  He was wonderfully well informed, considering he had never been out of Nepaul.  He knew all about England, our army, our mode of government, our parliament, and our Queen; whenever he alluded to Her Majesty he salaamed profoundly, whether as a tribute of respect to her, or in compliment to us as loyal subjects, we could not quite make out.  He described to us the route home by the Suez canal, and the fun of his talk was much heightened by his applying the native names to everything; London was Shuhur, the word meaning ‘a city,’ and he told us it was built on the Tham[=a]ss nuddee, by which he meant the Thames river.

Our magistrate had a Jemadar of Peons with him, a sort of head man among the servants.  This man, abundantly bedecked with ear-rings, finger-rings, and other ornaments, was a useless, bullying sort of fellow; dressed to the full extent of Oriental foppishness, and because he was the magistrate’s servant, he thought himself entitled to order the other servants about in the most lordly way.  He was now making himself peculiarly officious, shouting to the drivers to go here and there, to do this and do that, and indulging in copious torrents of abuse, without which it seems impossible for a native subordinate to give directions on any subject.  We were all rather amused, and could not help bursting into laughter, as, inflated with a sense of his own importance, he began abusing one of the native drivers of the Nepaulee chief; this man did not submit tamely to his insolence.  To him the magistrate was nobody, and the pompous Jemadar a perfect nonentity.  He accordingly turned round and poured forth a perfect flood of invective.  Never was collapse more utter.  The Jemadar took a back seat at once, and no more that day did we hear his melodious voice in tones of imperious command.