The plain is alive with shouting beaters hurrying up to secure the gory carcase of the slaughtered foe.  A riderless horse is far away, making off alone for the distant grove, where the snowy tents are glistening through the foliage.  On the distant horizon a small cluster of eager sportsmen are fast overhauling another luckless tusker, and enjoying in all their fierce excitement the same sensations you have just experienced.  Now is the time to enjoy the soothing weed, and quaff the grateful ‘peg’; and as the syces and other servants come up in groups of twos and threes, you listen with languid delight to all their remarks on the incidents of the chase; and as, with their acute Oriental imagination nations they dilate in terms of truly Eastern exaggeration on your wonderful pluck and daring, you almost fancy yourself really the hero they would make you out to be.

Then the reunion round the festive board at night, when every one again lives through all the excitement of the day.  Talk of fox-hunting after pig-sticking, it is like comparing a penny candle to a lighthouse, or a donkey race to the ‘Grand National’!

Peeprah Factory with its many patches of jungle, its various lakes and fine undulating country, was another favourite rendezvous for the votaries of pig-sticking.  The house itself was quite palatial, built on the bank of a lovely horseshoe lake, and embosomed in a grove of trees of great rarity and beautiful foliage.  It had been built long before the days of overland routes and Suez canals, when a planter made India his home, and spared no trouble nor expense to make his home comfortable.  In the great garden were fruit trees from almost every clime; little channels of solid masonry led water from the well to all parts of the garden.  Leading down to the lake was a broad flight of steps, guarded on the one side by an immense peepul tree, whose hollow trunk and wide stretching canopy of foliage had braved the storms of over half a century, on the other side by a most symmetrical almond tree, which, when in blossom, was the most beautiful object for miles around.  A well-kept shrubbery surrounded the house, and tall casuarinas, and glossy dark green india-rubber and bhur trees, formed a thousand combinations of shade and colour.  Here we often met to experience the warm, large-hearted hospitality of dear old Pat and his gentle little wife.  At one time there was a pack of harriers, which would lead us a fine, sharp burst by the thickets near the river after a doubling hare; but as a rule a meet at Peeprah portended death to the gallant tusker, for the jungles were full of pigs, and only honest hard work was meant when the Peeprah beaters turned out.