not robbery, is my profession ... and none but the merest novices would descend so low as to rob a tent or a dwelling-house.”  The colonel, however, expresses a shrewd suspicion, from circumstances which had come to his knowledge, that his distinguished visitor’s esprit de corps led him to deviate from truth in this particular—­a belief in which Captain Taylor’s pages fully bear him out.

The colonel’s movements, after quitting Calpee and its attractive circles, appear to have been somewhat desultory.  We find him, successively, at Murgaon or Murgong, Julalpore, Keitah, &c., without being told what decided his route; but from some subsequent remarks, it appears probable that he was engaged on engineering service by order of Government.  Between Julalpore and Keitah he fell in with a gang of nutts[9] or gipsies, whom the beauty of their women (a point to which the colonel is always alive) did not prevent him from suspecting of an intention to practise thuggee on his own portly person—­a belief in which he was confirmed by hearing them speak in another tongue among themselves—­no doubt the Ramasee, or cant language of the Thugs, subsequently made known to the world at large by the investigations of Major Sleeman.  At Goraree he purchased some small cups, carved from the variegated serpentine of the rock on which the town is built; but, on proposing to employ the artist in making some larger vases, “he told me that he was a very poor man, and his efforts had never been directed to larger patterns; meaning to infer that it was impossible he could either try or succeed!” Such is Hindoo nature!

[9] The Indian gipsies are several times mentioned in the journal of Bishop Heber, who says they are called Kunjas in Bengal.  Colonel Davidson also mentions a race in Bundelcund called Kunjurs who were in the habit, as he was informed by the Bramins, of “catching lizards, scorpions, snakes, and foxes,” which, if it is meant that they use them for food, is analogous to the omnivorous propensities of the gipsies.

Churkaree, the capital of Ruttun Sing Buhadoor, one of the principal of the numerous rajahs among whom Bundelcund is divided, is described as “prettily situated on the side of the hill, over a lake covered with the white lotus flower, and having a very fine appearance from a distance, as most of the houses have their upper stories whitewashed, and are seen peeping through the dark-green leafy trees of the country, but the town, which contains perhaps 15,000 souls, of whom 1000 may be Mussulmen, is very straggling, irregular, and dirty.”  The male population were all fiercely mustached, and loaded with arms; but their repulsive exterior was more than compensated by the charms of the other sex, all of whom wore immense hollow ankle bangles of zinc, filled with bits of gravel, which tinkled as they walked.  “I have never seen so many well-formed and handsome women together as I did at the wells outside the town, drawing water