MY FAVOURITE DOG KILLED. 201 



D.'s poultry, my patience and fortitude sufficed to support the 

 affliction, but when he touched me so nearly as to kill a 

 favourite hound, and possibly contemplated an attack upon 

 my horses as the next part of his night's entertainments, my 

 Christian resignation, and pagan philosophy alike vanished, 

 and I felt that it was time to be up and acting ; accordingly 

 calling for lanterns, I scrambled down the side of the gully, 

 followed by a Sikh orderly and one or two others, and within 

 a hundred yards of the stables, came upon the dead body 

 of the greyhound, mangled about the throat by which he 

 must have been seized, after he was pulled through the door- 

 way, and with an opening in the chest through which the 

 heart had been extracted and devoured. Of course of the 

 panther nothing was to be seen now. 



I watched beside the remains for an hour or more, hoping 

 that the villain would return to finish his supper, but to no 

 purpose ; nor did Goordut Singh, who remained after I had 

 left, see anything of him that night, nor during the next when 

 he watched again. After that we buried our canine friend 

 where he had been left by his murderer. 



D. and I concluded that this was the panther encoun- 

 tered near the bridge, and that it had followed us to the 

 house, but such was not the case, for some of my servants 

 who were sleeping in a little tent pitched on the side of the 

 road leading down from the Shillong heights and rather above 

 the house, had been roused from sleep by the noise of our 

 arrival, and looking out into the bright moonlight had seen 

 a panther standing on the road distant from them only a few 

 yards, and had silently watched him as he hesitated to advance 

 on our riding up and handing over our ponies to the grooms. 

 They went on to say that the beast then lay down in the 

 middle of the road till all was quiet, when he crept up to 

 the house ; also that, frightened by the close proximity of the 

 beast when under cover of a tent open in front, they had 

 refrained from calling out. The servants pronounced our 

 serenader to be a tree panther, the footprints and nocturnal 

 performances supporting the conjecture. Whether of the tree 



