Leaves from an Indian Jungle. 



This to such of us as were the more intimate of his friends. 



After a pull at the long glasses we leant back, and the 

 worthy old medico began : 



"It was in the ' seventies,' I must tell you, that the expe- 

 rience I am about to relate befell; and it was not very far 

 from here. (The old boy named a district that had borne 

 a great name for tigers.) 



" I was out on my usual hot-weather shoot, and arrived 

 one day at a village near which I had been informed there 

 was a solitary tiger of great age and enormous size that 

 had frequented those jungles for a great many years. Ha 

 had been fired at and hit by both sahibs and Kolis the 

 shikdris of those parts and bore a reputation for unfailing 

 cunning. He was also a 'very bad tiger,' and had killed 

 his three or four men. His latest performance in this line 

 had taken place not long before my advent, when he had 

 strolled out of the jungle in full daylight, and removed the 

 top of the skull of an old woman who was picking up mhowa 

 flowers under a tree. Not that he was in any way a 

 man-eater. His performances in the man-killing line were 

 evidently merely in revenge for the harm done him by 

 mankind : he was lame of one leg, and carried a matchlock 

 ball in his back. 



4 * The jungle he frequented was quite impossible to beat, if 

 indeed one could ever have persuaded beaters to enter it. 

 The very sight of a buffalo tied up as a bait drove him away 

 for days, and he never approached a natural kill or any 

 water-hole without making a complete circle round it and 

 carefully examining all the adjacent trees. He would stop 

 all traffic along the jungle tracks in the neighbourhood for 

 days at a time, in fact, he was a perfect shaitdn ! 



"Now there are lots of tigers with more or less similar 

 habits ; but I had bagged several of the kind, and felt that, 



