Replying, he mentioned first the number of his children, the blindness
of his wife, and then dropped into the picturesque native plea:
"Besides, you are my father and mother, the king of the realm, and if
I may not look to you, to whom shall I look?"

"Well, so much lying ought to be worth four annas," I said, and left
him happier with the coin.

There is one thing, of course, that would never do: it would never do
to write about India without saying something about lions, tigers, and
snakes. Last of all, therefore, let me come to this topic.

I didn't see any tigers, let me say frankly, except those in
cages--though there was one in Calcutta which had slain men and women
before they caught him, and whose titanic fury as he lunged against
his cage-bars, gnashing at the men before him, I shall never forget. A
jackal howled at my room-door in Jeypore one night; between Jeypore
and Bombay monkeys {259} were as thick as rabbits were in the old
county where I was reared; in Delhi only lack of time prevented me
from getting interested in a leopard hunt not many miles away; en
route to Darjeeling I saw a wild elephant staked out in the woods near
where he had evidently been caught; and near Khera Kalan I saw wild
deer leaping with their matchless grace across the level plains.

"In my district," one missionary told me, "five or six people a month
are killed by tigers and panthers and even more by snakes. One panther
carried off a man from my kitchen. We found his body half-eaten in the
jungle. It is customary when a body is found in this condition for
hunters to gather around it and await the return of the tiger or
panther. He will come back when hungry, and there is no other way so
sure for getting a man-eater."

As for snakes, I may mention that when I spent the night with a friend
in Madura I was shown a place near the house where a deadly cobra had
been seen (his bite kills in twenty minutes), while upon retiring I
was given the comforting assurance that it was not safe to put my foot
on the floor at night without having a light in the room!

As I rode out with Dr. J. P. Jones, of Pasamaila, he pointed to a
grassy mound near the roadside and said.

"See that grave over there? There's rather an interesting story
connected with it which I'll tell you. One day about four years ago
three snake-charmers came to my house, and as I had an American friend
and his son with me, I decided for the boy's sake to have them try