158 SPORT IN BENGAL. 



the winner of many races since then ; the country although 

 rough, hard, and divided into fields l}y ridges eighteen to 

 twenty-four inches high, with one now and then somewhat 

 higher, was sound enough, but do all we could, we could not 

 come up to the bull much under a couple of miles with the 

 long start given him, and then he received an ounce bullet 

 in his ribs with a considerable rake forward, and which seem- 

 ingly had no other effect upon him than to make him shake 

 his horns, and " put hams into his furnace." We had now 

 arrived upon broken ground with bushes and tree stumps 

 thickly strewn over it, and upon this my mare was not the 

 bull's superior in speed. Another mile and we got into denser 

 bush and stumps, the bull forging ahead now notwithstand- 

 ing all our efforts ; finally, when we had gone over four miles, 

 and I had fired an ineffectual shot from behind, the chase 

 sailed out of sight in the thickening jungle and was seen no 

 more. 



I returned to camp at dusk, a wiser and a sadder man 

 than when I had left it three hours before ; P. had reached it 

 before me, and on my arrival was smoking a cigar in a long 

 chair attired in an extremely easy and light costume. He 

 was reticent too about his adventures subsequent to our sepa- 

 ration, from which circumstance I concluded that his ride 

 had been no more successful than mine ; in short, I learned 

 afterwards that like Mr. Parsons in " Happy Thoughts," he 

 had had a " nasty cropper." After dinner, however, when the 

 discussion on small and big bores had been resumed, and once 

 more adjourned sine die, P. confided to me his opinion that 

 the pill administered to his bull had acted upon him as a 

 tonic, a " pick-me-up " of a very efficacious nature, and that 

 he had gone away at such a pace much in the same direction 

 as mine had taken, that he (P.) was debating in his mind 

 whether to continue the seemingly useless pursuit, when a fall 

 on his head upon some rough and hard clods finally decided the 

 matter, nevertheless he adhered to the opinion that an ounce 

 bullet put into the proper place was as effective as, &c., &c. 



In the present instance we have an example of how a 



