Attempts to defeat the ends of justice are very often made in India by the natives themselves on their own motion, to satisfy some personal animosity. Many cases might be cited of conspiracy to advance false and malicious charges against an enemy. In one case wounds were fabricated on a body already dead to support an accusation of murder. An old man was found with his head nearly separated from his body and other deep wounds in both shoulders, besides cuts on the back. Yet there had been no considerable effusion of blood, no retraction of the muscles, and medical opinion was emphatic that all these injuries had been inflicted after death, which had undoubtedly occurred from long-standing tubercular disease. It was presently shown that the whole case had been trumped up to support a charge of murder against an unpopular neighbour. [Illustration: A RELIGIOUS MENDICANT.] A monstrous case is recorded by Mr. Arthur Crawford, whose "Reminiscences" have been several times quoted in these pages, in which a son was on such bad terms with his father that he elaborated a great plot to involve him in disgrace and suffering, if not to convict him of his own (the son's) murder. The father was an aged and most respectable Brahmin in the South Konkan, Madhowrao by name, described as a kindly, courtly native gentleman, with intellectual, well-cut features, and spare and active in body. He had this one son, Vinayek, a constant trouble to him, chiefly on account of his wandering habits. He often absented himself for months together, and roamed the country as a _gosai_, or religious mendicant. After an unusually protracted absence, the father offered the police a reward if they would trace and find his son. The matter was taken up by a local constable, and he had no sooner commenced his investigations than he received an anonymous letter through the post charging the father with having made away with his son. The story was told most circumstantially: how Madhowrao, assisted by his widowed sister, who acted as his housekeeper, had strangled Vinayek in the dead of night, and had then employed two servants to throw the body to the alligators, at the foot of a torrent hard by the village. These servants came forward and described how they had seen the corpse with protruding eyes and tongue, the cord still round its neck, then how they had stripped it, and, tying it to a heavy stone, had thrown it into the water. The constable searched the house, and found hidden away a bundle of clothes with a pair of sandals. Moreover, he fished up a great heap of bones from the alligators' pool. The whole party were arrested, and the servants, the chief witnesses, were examined. They stuck to their story, declared that they had acted solely to oblige their master, who, they saw, was in great distress, and said that was all they knew.