small narrow-edged axes for felling, but for lopping they invariably
use the Nepaulese national weapon--the _kookree_. This is a heavy,
curved knife, with a broad blade, the edge very sharp, and the back
thick and heavy. In using it they slash right and left with a quick
downward stroke, drawing the blade quickly toward them as they strike.
They are wonderfully dexterous with the _kookree_, and will clear
away brush and underwood almost as quickly as a man can walk. They
pack their charcoal, rice, or other commodities, in long narrow
baskets, which they sling on a pole carried on their shoulders, as we
see the Chinese doing in the well known pictures on tea-chests. They
are all Hindoos in religion, but are very fond of rice-whiskey. Although
not so abstemious in this respect as the Hindoos of the plains, they
are a much finer race both physically and morally. As a rule they are
truthful, honest, brave, and independent. They are always glad to see
you, laugh out merrily at you as you pass, and are wonderfully
hospitable. It would be a nice point for Sir Wilfrid Lawson to
reconcile the use of rice-whiskey with this marked superiority in all
moral virtues in the whiskey-drinking, as against the totally-abstaining
Hindoo.

To return to Mehrman Singh. His face was seamed with smallpox marks,
and he had seven or eight black patches on it the first time I saw him,
caused by the splintering of his flint when he let off his antediluvian
gun. When he saw my breechloaders, the first he had ever beheld, his
admiration was unbounded. He told me he had come on a leopard asleep in
the forest one day, and crept up quite close to him. His faith in his
old gun, however, was not so lively as to make him rashly attack so
dangerous a customer, so he told me. 'Hum usko jans deydea oos wukt,'
that is, 'I _gave_ the brute its life that time, but,' he continued,
'had I had an English gun like this, your honour, I would have blown