attain to this honour, particularly those who have adopted the profession late in life, and remain all their lives as decoys, watchmen, grave-diggers, and removers of bodies. An attempt has been made, and with some success, to impress Thugs with the belief that the souls of their victims attain paradise, as in the case of other human victims, offered in sacrifice to this goddess, and become the tutelar saints of those who strangle them.
"This is, however, somewhat at variance with their notion, that the spirits of those who have been buried with the consecrated pickaxe can never rise from their graves; but it reminds me of an opinion that prevails amongst the people in wild and mountainous parts of India, that the spirit of a man destroyed by a tiger, sometimes rides upon his head and guides him from his pursuers.
"The person invested with the roomal has long used it in play before the practised eye of his gooroo, and has been long accustomed to see others use it in earnest; but it is still thought necessary to select for him easy victims at first, and they do not employ him indiscriminately, like the others, until he has shown his powers in the death of two or three travellers of feeble form and timid bearing. The maxim that 'dead men tell no tales' is invariably acted upon by these people, and they never rob a man until they have murdered him.
"In the territories of the native chiefs of Bundelcund, and those of Scindia and Holcar, a Thug feels just as independent and free as an Englishman in a tavern, and they will probably begin to feel themselves just as much so in those of Nagpore, now that European superintendency has been withdrawn. But they are not confined to the territories of the native chiefs; they are becoming numerous in our own, and are often found most securely and comfortably situated in the very seats of our principal judicial establishments; and of late years they are known to have formed some settlements to the east of the Ganges, in parts that they formerly used merely to visit in the course of their annual excursions.
"I should mention that the cow being a form of Doorga, or
