202 SPORT IN BENGAL. 



or the grass variety his boldness and impudence equalled 

 anything I have had experience of, except perhaps those of 

 Bengali candidates for employment. 



The first gruntings and " sawing " were designed doubt- 

 less to alarm the " Chokeydar " detected through the open 

 doorways, and to cause him to make a bolt out of the room, 

 when he might be readily captured and disposed of, the 

 playful rogue declining to enter the room which might be a 

 trap, with the man placed in it as the bait, whereas out in 

 the open air and bright moonlight all was fair, and honest 

 beasts had in them no cause to suspect mean artifices. Fail- 

 ing to draw the watchman, and warned off the premises by 

 D.'s five revolver bullets, Pard took a turn round by the 

 kitchen, and springing upon the thatched roof of the poultry- 

 house, made a hole in it sufficiently commodious to allow of 

 his dropping down easily on the inmates, of whom he dis- 

 posed of half-a-dozen, before the cries of the servants induced 

 him to make his exit by the same opening. Next he wasted 

 upon me the serenade which must have ended in his whiskers 

 being pretty closely dipt, and finally he went down the gully 

 and had a little supper at my expense. 



The following letter from F. D. W. gives a clear and 

 characteristic account of an adventure with an animal of the 

 same variety as that last-mentioned. My friend writes from 

 Doolah factory on the 19th March, 1883, and I may here 

 remark that were his strength and activity less than his 

 pluck and coolness, that letter would in all likelihood have 

 never been penned. " I came in here," writes my friend after 

 a few prefatory lines, "on the 10th, to take over charge, and 

 just before leaving my old factory about six miles off, a 

 Coolie arrived to tell me that there was a leopard shut in 

 here in the bath-room. I started at once about ten o'clock, 

 and when I arrived here, found all the doors shut and my 

 guns inside. I entered by one of the doors on the north 

 side, and got hold of a rifle, and was then shown the room on 

 the west in which the leopard was. The door was closed 

 (but not bolted), and looking in through the Venetians, I saw 



