202 
SCENES IN INDIA. 
weighed,, when prepared for cooking, just thirty-two 
pounds. We purchased it for one rupee, or about 
twenty-two pence. 
All being now ready, the carnivorous Sudra com- 
menced his extraordinary feast. Having cut off the 
sheep’s head with a single stroke of his sabre and 
jointed the body in due form, he separated all the 
meat from the bones, the whole quantity to be de- 
voured amounting to about twenty pounds. This 
meat he minced very fine, forming it into balls about 
the size of a small fowl’s egg, first mixing with it 
plenty of spice and curry powder. As soon as the 
whole was prepared, he fried some of the balls over a 
fire, which he had previously kindled at the root of a 
tree, eating and frying till the whole were consumed. 
At intervals he washed down the meat with copious 
potations of ghee, which is sometimes so rancid as to 
be quite disgusting ; and this happened to be the case 
now. After his prodigious meal, the performer was 
certainly far less active than he had previously been. 
His meagre body had acquired a considerable degree 
of rotundity, and although he declared that he felt 
not the slightest inconvenience, it was evident that 
he had taken as much as he could hold, and more 
than was agreeable. He acknowledged that he could 
not manage to eat a sheep at a meal more than twice 
in one week, and that this was oftener than he should 
like to do it. 
Extraordinary as such an appetite may appear, it 
is very much less so than that act of carnivorous 
barbarity, mentioned by Colonel Mackenzie in the 
Transactions of the Royal Asiatic Society, where a 
