THE HILL-MEN. 
43 
the feuds, even between the families of less distin- 
guished note among them, that they are quenched 
only by the extermination of one or the other ; while 
individual cases of revenge are scarcely less frequent 
and, perhaps, no less sanguinary than are to be found 
among the more brutalized population of central Africa. 
They who, from their superior birth and wealth, can 
command the devotion of their retainers by paying 
them the wages of plunder, attack and pillage their 
weaker neighbours, leaving them to their retaliation 
when they shall have acquired the means. They are 
almost invariably cruel and tyrannical masters, but 
to their superiors in power fawning and meanly sub- 
servient. 
“ The inhabitants of Nawar and Teekur,” says 
Mr. Fraser, “ are notorious for infamy of character 
even in this country, where all are bad. They are 
revengeful and treacherous, deficient in all good qua- 
lities, abandoned in morals and vicious in their habits. 
As a proof of the savage indifference with which they 
look on the life of another and on the act of shedding 
human blood, it is said that mere wantonness or a joke 
will induce the crime of putting a fellow-creature to 
death, merely for the satisfaction of seeing the blood 
flow and of marking the last struggles of their victim. 
Female chastity is here quite unknown, and murder, 
robbery, and outrage of every kind are regarded with 
indifference. They are generally unpleasing in ap- 
pearance, mean, grovelling, cowardly, and cruel. It 
would seem as if the faint approaches they have 
made towards civilization, had only awakened the 
evil passions and propensities of the mind, which yet 
