and afterwards the others were discovered in succession. Feringeea then proposed to discover other graves in the neighbouring groves, but Captain Sleeman could stand no more of such horrors for that morning. It transpired that the Pundit's horse had been presented to the proprietor of the village, in which some of the gang actually resided, and that the others came thither every year and stopped some time "feasting, carousing and murdering," and yet neither the police nor the inhabitants appeared to have the slightest suspicion of the real nature of their pursuits. It must be remembered that they never murdered any but strangers and wayfarers, and that the villagers and their property would be perfectly secure. It would be an excess of charity, however, to suppose that the Zemindar had not a shrewd guess as to the means by which his horse was obtained. During the three years, 1822 to 1824, both inclusive, that Captain Sleeman was magistrate of the Nursingpore district in the Nerbuddah valley, and--as he imagined--cognizant of every crime and every bad character within its limits, he was perfectly unconscious that there was a Thug village only 400 yards from the Court-house, and that only a few miles distant the groves of Mundaisur contained fully one hundred dead bodies. These groves were a favourite place of rendezvous for gangs coming from Upper India and from the Deccan, with the connivance and under the protection of two respectable landholders, descendants of the pious individuals who had planted those trees to shelter the unhoused wanderer.