A FEW ELEPHANT STORIES. 197 



As soon as she reached the open country she took the 

 road to the nearest English settlement, and my Nabob's 

 was the first house where she rested in her flight. In 

 gratitude for his immense kindness to her, she gave him 

 her protector, the elephant ; and he, with the faithfulness 

 I have described, transferred his allegiance to his new 

 master and then to me. Mariana, meanwhile, reached 

 the district magistrate, a hundred miles farther on, in 

 whose family she remained and with whom she returned 

 to England. This is the only case I know, by the way, 

 of a Brahman voluntarily going into exile. 



The elephant plays an important part in other native 

 festivals besides this one of the Moharem, and I have seen, 

 in a sacred procession in India at the feast of Juggernaut, 

 over two hundred of the native devotees called fakirs 

 throw themselves down beneath the white elephants, 

 where they were sure of being crushed under their 

 ponderous feet. 



I have already spoken of the intelligence and memorj' 

 of the elephant. In Ceylon I once saw a fine herd of 

 fifteen elephants, used by the chief magistrate as his 

 hunting stud, lying under the spreading trees around his 

 house, as is their custom. A sudden thunder-storm came 

 up, with the vivid flashes and tremendous claps of thunder 

 of that latitude ; when the elephants, instead of taking 

 refuge still closer under the trees, at the first flash moved 

 quickly out into the open away from shelter, stood stoi- 

 cally through the down-pour, and as soon as the rain was 



