456 A NATURALIST'S WANDEPdNGS 



to see that I was properly attended. His instructions, how- 

 ever, were neglected the moment he turned his back and left 

 the direction of affairs to his old uncle, who acted as Viceroy. 

 The kingdom was by their custom bound to supply me with 

 provisions, eacli family having one day's rations to provide 

 and deliver at our guarda. As the people lived so widely 

 scattered, they often managed to shirk their duty, leaving us 

 utterly without anything to eat, I would far rather have 

 purchased provisions; but no one would sell or desired to sell. 

 Out of their scant stores they grudgingly gave what they were 

 ordered to give, and had they accepted any price for it, it 

 would have been claimed by the Eajah. 



On one occasion, after having gone without a particle of 

 food for a whole day, even after appeal and threats to the 

 Viceroy, I took the law into my own hands by shooting the 

 first large fat pig I encountered. It was the property, as it 

 luckily turned out, of the Eajah himself. I say lui^kily, for 

 I would rather that his herds were plundered than his people's, 

 and because this simple act disclosed for me a curious 

 law of their country. By the fault of some member of this 

 community my act had caused this loss to the Eajah, a wrong 

 which had to be expiated by a fine levied on all the Sulais of 

 the kingdom, not on the offending individual alone. 



In the early days of our own history, *^ the price of life or limb 

 was paid, not by the wrong-doer to the man he wronged, but by 

 the family or house of the wrong-doer to the family or house of 

 the wronged. Order and law were thus made to rest in each 

 little group of English people upon the blood-bond which knit 

 its families together ; every outrage was held to have been done 

 by all who were linked by blood to the doer of it ; every crime 

 to have been done against all who were linked by blood to the 

 sufferers from it. From this sense of the yalue of the family 

 bond as a means of restraining the wrong-doer by forces which 

 the tribe as a whole did not possess, sprang the first rude fom:is 

 of English justice. Each kinsman was his kinsman's keeper, 

 bound to protect him from wrong-doing, and to suffer with 

 and pay for him if wrong were done/** 



This incident is one which well illustrates how near a 

 traveller seeking for information of an abstract kind, may be 



Green's ' History of the English People/ page 3. 



