ately devoted to sporting! Your days and months are passed in its excitement. A tiger, a panther, a buffalo, or a hog, rouses your utmost energies for its destruction—you even risk your lives in its pursuit. How much higher game is a Thug's! His is man: against his fellow-creatures in every degree, from infancy to old age, he has sworn relentless, unerring destruction!
Ah! you are a horrible set of miscreants, said I; I have indeed the experience, from the records of murders which are daily being unfolded to me, of knowing this at least of you. But you must begin your story; I am prepared to listen to details worse than I can imagine human beings to have ever perpetrated.
It will even be as you think, said Ameer Ali, and I will conceal nothing; of course you wish me to begin my tale from as early a period as I can recollect.
Certainly; I am writing your life for the information of those in England, who would no doubt like to have every particular of so renowned a person as yourself.
Well, then, Sahib, to begin; the earliest remembrance I have of anything, and until a few years ago it was very indistinct, is of a vil-