SACRED BABOONS. tJ3 



" Wicked Harbarat's place" is, and always will be, the 

 name of a certain estate near Agra, once the bungalow 

 of a Captain Herbert, who had been tormented with 

 honumans till he renounced the plan of turning the 

 estate into a remunerative fruit-farm. But he retreated 

 with a Parthian shot : the day after his departure some 

 fifty or sixty martyrs, full of bananas and strychnine, 

 were picked up in his garden. 



Captain Elphinstone's servant, who had crippled a 

 bhunder-monkey, was repeatedly pursued by a howling 

 mob, and on one occasion was chased all over Delhi 

 before he could give his pursuers the slip in the Moham- 

 medan quarter, where a stout Unitarian kept the rabble 

 at bay till the fugitive had effected his escape through a 

 back-door. For the Moslems hate the baboons with an 

 intense and perfect hatred, and, unlike the Franks, who 

 are more apt to be reconciled by the comic features 

 of the superstition, they denounce the monkey-wor- 

 shippers as idolaters, outrageous provokers of Allah's 

 threatened wrath. They post special watchmen to keep 

 the hateful beasts out of their mosque-gardens ; but, even 

 there, expulsion and a kick a tergo is all they dare re- 

 sort to: the pressure of public opinion is too much even 

 for an Oriental fanatic. When the power of the Mogul 

 dynasty was at its height, Shah Allum's Mahratta Pesh- 

 war (Maire du Palais) was once returning from his daily 

 round of inspection when -he heard that his youngest 

 child had been attacked and viciously bitten by a troop 



