the Mogul then resided:--This elephant used often to pass through
the bazar, or market-place, where a woman who there sold herbs used to
give him a handful as he passed her stall. This elephant afterwards went
mad,[234] and, having broken his fetters, took his way furiously through
the market-place, whence all the people fled as quickly as possible to
get out of his way. Among these was his old friend the herb-woman, who,
in her haste and terror, forgot to take away her little child. On coming
to the place where this woman was in use to sit, the elephant stopped,
and seeing the child among the herbs, he took it up gently in his trunk,
and laid it carefully on a stall under the projecting roof of a house
hard by, without doing it the smallest injury, and then continued his
furious course. A travelling Jesuit, named Acosta, relates a similar
story of an elephant at Goa, as from his own experience.--The king keeps
certain elephants for the execution of malefactors. When one of these is
brought forth to dispatch a criminal, if his keeper desires that the
offender be destroyed speedily, this vast creature will instantly crush
him to atoms under his foot; but if desired to torture him, will break
his limbs successively, as men are broken on the wheel.

[Footnote 234: This temporary madness of the male elephants is usual in
the rutting season.--E.]

The Mogul takes great delight in these stately animals, and often, when
he sits in state, calls for some of the finest and largest to be
brought, which are taught to bend before him, as in reverence, when they
come into his presence. They often fight before him, beginning their
combats like rams, by running furiously against each other, and butting
with their foreheads. They afterwards use their tusks and teeth,
fighting with the utmost fury, yet are they most careful to preserve
their keepers, so that few of them receive any hurt in these
rencounters. They are governed by a hooked instrument of steel, made
like the iron end of a boat-hook, with which their keepers, who sit on
their necks, put them back, or goad them on, at pleasure.

The king has many of his elephants trained up for war; each of which
carries an iron gun about six feet long, which is fastened to a strong
square frame of wood on his back, made fast by strong girths or ropes
round his body. This gun carries a bullet about the size of a small
tennis-ball, and is let into the timber with a loop of iron. The four
cor