icularly bad crew. On that expedition they
murdered a fakeer and twelve beggars. And yet Bhowanee protected them;
for once when they were strangling a man in a wood when a crowd was going
by close at hand and the noose slipped and the man screamed, Bhowanee
made a camel burst out at the same moment with a roar that drowned the
scream; and before the man could repeat it the breath was choked out of
his body.

The cow is so sacred in India that to kill her keeper is an awful
sacrilege, and even the Thugs recognized this; yet now and then the lust
for blood was too strong, and so they did kill a few cow-keepers. In one
of these instances the witness who killed the cowherd said, "In Thuggee
this is strictly forbidden, and is an act from which no good can come. I
was ill of a fever for ten days afterward. I do believe that evil will
follow the murder of a man with a cow. If there be no cow it does not
signify." Another Thug said he held the cowherd's feet while this
witness did the strangling. He felt no concern, "because the bad fortune
of such a deed is upon the strangler and not upon the assistants; even if
there should be a hundred of them."

There were thousands of Thugs roving over India constantly, during many
generations. They made Thug gee a hereditary vocation and taught it to
their sons and to their son's sons. Boys were in full membership as
early as 16 years of age; veterans were still at work at 70. What was
the fascination, what was the impulse? Apparently, it was partly piety,
largely gain, and there is reason to suspect that the sport afforded was
the chiefest fascination of all. Meadows Taylor makes a Thug in one of
his books claim that the pleasure of killing men was the white man's
beast-hunting instinct enlarged, refined, ennobled. I will quote the
passage:

CHAPTER XLVII.

Simple rules for saving money: To save half, when you are fired by an
eager impulse to contribute to a charity, wait, and count forty. To save
three-quarters, count sixty. To save it all, count sixty-five.
--Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.

The Thug said:

"How many of you English are passionately devoted to sporting! Your days
and months are passed in its excitement. A tiger, a panther, a buffalo
or a hog rouses your utmost energies for its destruction--you even risk
your lives in its pursuit. How much higher game is a Thug's!"

That must really be the secret of the