In a twinkling the cook caught the chicken: its head was turned toward Mecca. Bismillah! O God the Compassionate, the Merciful! the poor fowl's head flew off, and by the time we had made our ablutions supper was ready. Turning across the ridges to the north-eastward from Sipri, we were soon making our way among the tanks and groves which lie about the walls of Jhansi. Here, as at Poona, there was ever present to me a sense of evil destinies, of blood, of treacheries, which seemed to linger about the trees and the tanks like exhalations from the old crimes which have stained the soil of the country. For Jhansi is in the Bundelcund, and the Bundelcund was born in great iniquity. The very name--which properly is _Bundelakhand,_ or "the country of the Bundelas"--has a history thickly set about with the terrors of caste, of murder and of usurpation. Some five hundred years ago a certain Rajput prince, Hurdeo Sing, committed the unpardonable sin of marrying a slave (_bundi_), and was in consequence expelled from the Kshatriya caste to which he belonged. He fled with his disgrace into this region, and after some years found opportunity at least to salve his wounds with blood and power. The son of the king into whose land he had escaped conceived a passion for the daughter of the slave wife. It must needs have been a mighty sentiment, for the conditions which Hurdeo Sing exacted were of a nature to try the strongest love. These were, that the nuptial banquet should be prepared by the unmentionable hands of the slave wife herself, and that the king and his court should partake of it--a proceeding which would involve the loss of their caste also. But the prince loved, and his love must have lent him extraordinary eloquence, for he prevailed on his royal father to accept the disgrace. If one could only stop here, and record that he won his bride, succeeded his magnanimous old parent on the throne, lived a long and happy life with his queen, and finally died regretted by his loving people! But this is in the Bundelcund, and the facts are, that the treacherous Hurdeo Sing caused opium to be secretly put into all the dishes of the wedding-feast, and when the unsuspecting revelers were completely stupefied by the drug had the whole party assassinated, after which he possessed himself of the throne and founded the Bundelcund. One does not wonder that the hills and forests of such a land became the hiding-places of the strangling Thugs, the home of the poisoning Dacoits, the refuge of conspirators and insurgents and the terror of Central India.