"'From 1822 to 1824, when I was charged with the magistracy and civil
administration of the district of Nersingpore, not a murder, not the
least robbery was committed by an ordinary criminal, without my being
immediately informed of it; but if any one had come and told me at this
period, that a band of hereditary assassins by profession lived in the
village of Kundelie, within about four hundred yards of my court of
justice--that the beautiful groves of the village of Mundesoor, within a
day's march of my residence, formed one of the most frightful marts of
assassination in all India--that numerous bands of 'Brothers of the Good
Work,' coming from Hindostan and the Deccan, met annually beneath these
shades, as at a solemn festival, to exercise their dreadful vocation upon
all the roads which cross each other in this locality--I should have
taken such a person for a madman, or one who had been imposed upon by
idle tales. And yet nothing could be truer; hundreds of travellers had
been buried every year in the groves of Mundesoor; a whole tribe of
assassins lived close to my door, at the very time I was supreme
magistrate of the province, and extended their devastations to the cities
of Poonah and Hyderabad. I shall never forget, when, to convince me of
the fact, one of the chiefs of the Stranglers, who had turned informer
against them, caused thirteen bodies to be dug up from the ground beneath
my tent, and offered to produce any number from the soil in the immediate
vicinity.'[5]

"These few words of Colonel Sleeman will give some idea of this dread
society, which has its laws, duties, customs, opposed to all other laws,
human and divine. Devoted to each other, even to heroism, blindly
obedient to their chiefs, who profess themselves the immediate
representatives of their dark divinity, regarding as enemies all who do
not belong to them, gaining recruits everywhere by a frightful system of
proselytising--these apostles of a religion of murder go preaching their