PHANSIGARS. 
129 
but have always returned to it when opportunity 
offered of a successful enterprise. 
Even when so bowed by the weight of years as to 
be unable to take an active part with the younger 
members of their tribe, they do not quit the service, 
but act as watchers, procure intelligence, and decoy 
the unwary traveller by a well-feigned tale of dis- 
tress, into some remote spot, where he is silenced for 
ever, and sleeps his last sleep in the solitude where 
no human eye ever beholds his grave. The old or 
disabled wait upon the younger, prepare their food, 
and perform all the various servile offices to which 
the more efficient members of their community have 
neither time nor disposition to attend. The social 
elements which unite together this strange race, ab- 
horrent as they are from every tie of humanity, are 
of so binding a nature, that few of its members ever 
secede to take a higher stand among their less de- 
graded fellow-creatures. They unite more nearly, by 
intermarriages, those bonds of conjunction in which they 
are so closely held together. Thus the tie of relation- 
ship is so extended, that their union becomes the more 
fixed, from the mysterious influence of that indissolu- 
ble link attached by the wisdom of the Creator to our 
finest sympathies, to keep alive the desire of mutual 
communion for which man was especially constituted, 
and without which he could have no real happiness. 
Desperate and degrading as their employments are 
known to be, the Phansigars frequently marry into 
families that have the name of being respectable; 
it not being much the custom in India for women 
