s. These Pindaris will
beg from the owners of buffaloes for the above reason. They revere
the dog and will not kill it, and also worship snakes and tigers,
believing that these animals never do them injury. They carry their
dead to the grave in a sitting posture, seated in a _jholi_ or wallet,
and bury them in the same position. They wear their beards and do
not shave. Some of these Pindaris are personal servants, others
cultivators and labourers, and others snake-charmers and jugglers.

9. Attractions of a Pindari's life

The freebooting life of the Pindaris, unmitigated scoundrels though
they were, no doubt had great charms, and must often have been recalled
with regret by those who settled down to the quiet humdrum existence
of a cultivator. This feeling has been admirably depicted in Sir
Alfred Lyall's well-known poem, of which it will be permissible to
quote a short extract:

When I rode a Dekhani charger with the saddle-cloth gold-laced,
And a Persian sword and a twelve-foot spear and a pistol at
my waist.
It's many a year gone by now; and yet I often dream
Of a long dark march to the Jumna, of splashing across the stream,
Of the waning moon on the water and the spears in the dim starlight
As I rode in front of my mother [447] and wondered at all the
sight.
Then the streak of the pearly dawn--the flash of a sentinel's gun,
The gallop and glint of horsemen who wheeled in the level sun,
The shots in the clear still morning, the white smoke's eddying
wreath,
Is this the same land that I live in, the dull dank air that
I breathe?
And if I were forty years younger, with my life before me to
choose,
I wouldn't be lectured by Kafirs or bullied by fat Hindoos;
But I'd go to some far-off country where Musalmans still are men,
Or take to the jungle like Chetoo, and die in the tiger's den.

Prabhu

1. Historical notice

_Prabhu, Parbhu._--The Maratha caste of clerks, accountants and
patwaris corresponding to the Kayasths. They numbered about 1400
persons in the southern Districts of the Central Provinces and Berar
in 1911. The Prabhus,