him assume the tiger shape, to thrust it into his mouth.  She consented, the washerman ate his root, and became instantly a tiger; but his wife was so terrified at the sight of her husband in this shape that she ran off with the antidote in her hand.  Poor old Raghu took to the woods, and there ate a good many of his old friends from neighbouring villages; but he was at last shot, and recognized from the circumstance of his having no tail.  You may be quite sure,’ concluded Sarimant, ’when you hear of a tiger without a tail, that it is some unfortunate man who has eaten of that root, and of all the tigers he will be found the most mischievous.’

How my friend had satisfied himself of the truth of this story I know not, but he religiously believes it, and so do all his attendants and mine; and, out of a population of thirty thousand people in the town of Sagar, not one would doubt the story of the washerman if he heard it.

I was one day talking with my friend the Raja of Maihar.[6] on the road between Jubbulpore and Mirzapore, on the subject of the number of men who had been lately killed by tigers at the Katra Pass on that road,[7] and the best means of removing the danger.  ‘Nothing’, said the Raja, ’could be more easy or more cheap than the destruction of these tigers, if they were of the ordinary sort; but the tigers that kill men by wholesale, as these do, are, you may be sure, men themselves converted into tigers by the force of their science, and such animals are of all the most unmanageable.’

’And how is it.  Raja Sahib, that these men convert themselves into tigers?’

‘Nothing’, said he, ’is more easy than this to persons who have once acquired the science; but how they learn it, or what it is, we unlettered men know not.’

’There was once a high priest of a large temple, in this very valley of Maihar, who was in the habit of getting himself converted into a tiger by the force of this science, which he had thoroughly acquired.  He had a necklace, which one of his disciples used to throw over his neck the moment the tiger’s form became fully developed.  He had, however, long given up the practice, and all his old disciples had gone off on their pilgrimages to distant shrines, when he was one day seized with a violent desire to take his old form of the tiger.  He expressed the wish to one of his new disciples, and demanded whether he thought he might rely on his courage to stand by and put on the necklace.  ‘Assuredly you may’, said the disciple; ’such is my faith in you, and in the God we serve, that I fear nothing.’  The high priest upon this put the necklace into his hand with the requisite instructions, and forthwith began to change his form.  The disciple stood trembling in every limb, till he heard him give a roar that shook the whole edifice, when he fell flat upon his face, and dropped the necklace on the floor.  The tiger bounded over him, and out of the door, and infested all the roads leading to the temple for many years afterwards.’