Some notion of the fearful damages committed by Tigers in India will be gained from the following extract:--“Cattle killed in my district are numberless. As regards human beings, one Tiger in 1867-8-9, killed, respectively, twenty-seven, thirty-four, forty-seven people. I have known it attack a party and kill four or five at a time. Once it killed a father, mother, and three children; and the week before it was shot it killed seven people. It wandered over a tract of twenty miles, never remaining in the same spot two consecutive days, and at last was destroyed by a bullet from a spring gun, when returning to feed on the body of one of its victims--a woman. At Nynee Tal, in Kumaon, in 1856-7-8, there was a Tiger that prowled about within a circle, say, of twenty miles, and it killed, on an average, about eighty men per annum. The haunts were well known at all seasons.... This Tiger was afterwards shot while devouring the body of an aged person it had killed.” It is also stated in a Government report that “in one instance, in the Central Provinces, a single Tigress caused the desertion of thirteen villages, and two hundred and fifty square miles of country were thrown out of cultivation. This state of things would, undoubtedly, have continued, but for the timely arrival of a gentleman who, happily, was fortunate enough, with the aid of his gun, to put an end to her eventful career.” Again, it is reported, “that one Tigress, in 1869, killed 127 people, and stopped a public road for many weeks, and was finally killed by the opportune arrival of an English sportsman.” As might naturally be expected, an enemy so dreadful is sure to have supernatural power ascribed to it by the credulous natives, whose property is destroyed, and whose lives are endangered by the ravages of this terrible beast. People in the state of civilisation of the ordinary Indian villages are sure to think there is something more than natural in an animal capable of such wholesale destruction, so wantonly cruel, of such fearful strength and such terrible beauty; and the following passages will give some idea of the prowess ascribed to the Tiger by those who are the greatest sufferers from his bloody disposition:--