your goal, and the wild excitement culminates as you feel your keen
steel go straight through muscle, bone, and sinew, and you know that
another grisly monster has fallen. As you ease your girths and wipe
your heated brow, you feel that few pleasures of the chase come up to
the noblest, most thrilling sport of all, that of pig-sticking.

The plain is alive with shouting beaters hurrying up to secure the gory
carcase of the slaughtered foe. A riderless horse is far away, making
off alone for the distant grove, where the snowy tents are glistening
through the foliage. On the distant horizon a small cluster of eager
sportsmen are fast overhauling another luckless tusker, and enjoying in
all their fierce excitement the same sensations you have just
experienced. Now is the time to enjoy the soothing weed, and quaff the
grateful 'peg'; and as the syces and other servants come up in groups
of twos and threes, you listen with languid delight to all their
remarks on the incidents of the chase; and as, with their acute
Oriental imagination nations they dilate in terms of truly Eastern
exaggeration on your wonderful pluck and daring, you almost fancy
yourself really the hero they would make you out to be.

Then the reunion round the festive board at night, when every one again
lives through all the excitement of the day. Talk of fox-hunting after
pig-sticking, it is like comparing a penny candle to a lighthouse, or a
donkey race to the 'Grand National'!

Peeprah Factory with its many patches of jungle, its various lakes and
fine undulating country, was another favourite rendezvous for the
votaries of pig-sticking. The house itself was quite palatial, built on
the bank of a lovely horseshoe lake, and embosomed in a grove of trees
of great rarity and beautiful foliage. It had been built long before