In the course of time, however, Jumnie grew up to maturity, being one year old, and formed an attachment for one of her own race--a wild, roving bandit of a neulah, who committed such deeds of atrocity in the fowl-house as to compel us to take up arms again. If she had only made her mistress the confidante of her love!--but, alas! little did we suspect _our_ neulah of a companionship with thieves and assassins; and so leaving her, we thought, to her customary frolics, we marched upon the stronghold of the enemy. Two neulahs appeared, we fired, and one fell, the other running off unscathed. We all hastened to the wounded and bleeding victim, and my little daughter first of all; but how shall I describe her grief when she saw her little Jumnie writhing at her feet in the agonies of death! If I had had the least idea of Jumnie's having formed such an attachment, I should have spared the guilty for the sake of the innocent, and Jumnie might long have lived a favorite pet; but the deed was done. The neulahs, like other of the weasel kind--and like some animals I know of a loftier species--are very rapacious, slaying without reference to their wants; and Jumnie, although fond of milk, used to delight in livers and brains of fowls, which she relished even after they were dressed for our table. The natives of India never molest the neulah. They like to see it about their dwellings, on account of its snake and rat-killing propensities; and on a similar account it must have been that this creature was deified by the Egyptians, whose country abounded with reptiles, and would have been absolutely alive with crocodiles but for the havoc it made among the numerous eggs, which it delighted to suck. For this reason the ichneumons were embalmed as public benefactors, and their bodies are still found lying in state in some of the pyramids. Among the Hindoos, however, the neulah does not obtain quite such high honors, although the elephant, monkey, lion, snake, rat, goose, &c., play a prominent part in the religious myths, and are styled the Bâhons, or vehicles of the gods. In Hindoostan the ichneumon is not supposed to kill the crocodile, though it is in the mouth of every old woman that it possesses the knowledge of a remedy against the bite of a poisonous snake, which its instinct leads it to dig out of the ground; but this _on dit_ has never been ascertained to be true, and my belief is that it is only based on the great agility and dexterity of the neulah. Eye-witnesses say that his battles with man's greatest enemy end generally in the death of the snake, which the neulah seizes by the back of the neck, and after frequent onsets at last kills and eats, rejecting nothing but the head.