Thus we pursued our ambulatory meditations through the Góndwana. If we had been sportsmen, we should have found full as varied a field for the bagging of game as for that more spiritual hunt after new ideas and sensations in which we were engaged. Gray quail, gray partridges, painted partridges (_Francolinus pictus_), snipe and many varieties of water-fowl, the sambor, the black antelope, the Indian gazelle or ravine deer, the gaur or Indian bison, chewing the cud in the midday shade or drinking from a clear stream, troops of _nilgaé_ springing out from the long grass and dwarf growth of polás and jujube trees which covered the sites of abandoned villages and fields,--all these revealed themselves to us in the most tempting situations. But although I had been an ardent devotee of the double-barrel, the large and manly tenderness which Bhima Gandharva invariably displayed toward all animals, whether wild or tame, had wrought marvels upon me, and I had grown fairly ashamed--nay, horrified--at the idea that anything which a generous and brave man could call _sport_ should consist wholly in the most keen and savage cruelties inflicted upon creatures whom we fight at the most unknightly odds, we armed, they unarmed. While I knew that our pleasures are by the divine order mostly distillations from pain, I could not now help recognizing at the same time that this circumstance was part of an enormous plan which the slaughter of innocent creatures in the way of "sport" did in nowise help to carry out.