cutting is fearfully wasteful; they always leave some three feet of the best part of the wood in the ground, very rarely cutting a tree close down to the root.  Many of them are good charcoal-burners, and indeed their principal occupation is supplying the adjacent villages with charcoal and firewood.  They use small narrow-edged axes for felling, but for lopping they invariably use the Nepaulese national weapon—­the kookree.  This is a heavy, curved knife, with a broad blade, the edge very sharp, and the back thick and heavy.  In using it they slash right and left with a quick downward stroke, drawing the blade quickly toward them as they strike.  They are wonderfully dexterous with the kookree, and will clear away brush and underwood almost as quickly as a man can walk.  They pack their charcoal, rice, or other commodities, in long narrow baskets, which they sling on a pole carried on their shoulders, as we see the Chinese doing in the well known pictures on tea-chests.  They are all Hindoos in religion, but are very fond of rice-whiskey.  Although not so abstemious in this respect as the Hindoos of the plains, they are a much finer race both physically and morally.  As a rule they are truthful, honest, brave, and independent.  They are always glad to see you, laugh out merrily at you as you pass, and are wonderfully hospitable.  It would be a nice point for Sir Wilfrid Lawson to reconcile the use of rice-whiskey with this marked superiority in all moral virtues in the whiskey-drinking, as against the totally-abstaining Hindoo.

To return to Mehrman Singh.  His face was seamed with smallpox marks, and he had seven or eight black patches on it the first time I saw him, caused by the splintering of his flint when he let off his antediluvian gun.  When he saw my breechloaders, the first he had ever beheld, his admiration was unbounded.  He told me he had come on a leopard asleep in the forest one day, and crept up quite close to him.  His faith in his old gun, however, was not so lively as to make him rashly attack so dangerous a customer, so he told me.  ‘Hum usko jans deydea oos wukt,’ that is, ‘I gave the brute its life that time, but,’ he continued, ’had I had an English gun like this, your honour, I would have blown the soor (Anglice, pig) to hell.’  Old Mehrman was rather strong in his expletives at times, but I was not a little amused at the cool way he spoke of giving the leopard its life.  The probability is, that had he only wounded the animal, he would have lost his own.

These Nepaulese are very fond of giving feasts to each other.  Their dinner-parties, I assure you, are very often ‘great affairs.’  They are not mean in their arrangements, and the wants of the inner man are very amply provided for.  Their crockery is simple and inexpensive.  When the feast is prepared, each guest provides himself with a few broad leaves from the nearest sal tree, and forming these into a cup, he pins them together