FOUR-FOOTED PRIZE-FIGHTERS. 2 A' 



Since the abolition of their cruel religious ceremonies, 

 beast-fights seem to form the chief pastimes of the Hin- 

 dostan princes. The largest walled circus of modern 

 times is in Baroda, where the Guicowar has a special 

 park with elephants, panthers, and rhinoceroses enough 

 to get up a bi-weekly fight, — and no sham fight, either 

 (Louis Rousselet's " India," chap. vi.). He has a troop of 

 drilled matadors, — " elephantadors," as Rousselet calls 

 them, — besides trainers and hunters, and has paid as 

 much as eight hundred dollars for a good hutti. 



Domesticated elephants, however, have to be fuddled 

 with bangh to excite their combativeness, and their train- 

 ing is so expensive that rajahs of moderate means pre- 

 fer prize-fighters per naturam, — panthers and wild boars. 

 Ranjit Sing, the Maharajah of Dholepore, used to keep 

 a park of picked tigers that were fed on live dogs and 

 pitted against all the wild beasts his hunters could lay- 

 hands on. One of these tigers, an enormous brute with 

 a head like an ogre, was presented to General Havelock, 

 and thus found its way to Lucknow, but it was finally 

 sent back to the maharajah's successor, who had set his 

 heart on having the best fighting-tigers in India. The 

 last Nizam of Hyderabad had a tame cheetah that fol- 

 lowed him in all his campaigns and enjoyed all the privi- 

 leges of a court favorite ; nay, Aga Muhamed, the Gui- 

 cowar of Guzerat, kept a carnivorous horse, an unnatural 

 brute, which once, in the presence of Professor Schla- 



gintweit, knocked down a goat and devoured its udder 



17 



