“He generally took the field in the month of March, accompanied by ten thousand cavalry and as many infantry, and from seven to eight hundred elephants. From forty to sixty thousand people followed the camp, with grain and merchandise. When the vizier set out from his palace at Lucknow, a line was formed with the prince in the centre, mounted on an elephant, with two attendant elephants,—one carrying his state howdah, the other his sporting howdah. A line of elephants was prolonged on each side the prince, and was flanked at each extremity by the cavalry. The immense cavalcade proceeded straight through the country, regardless of the mischief that was a necessary consequence; the poor cultivators running after the vizier, crying aloud for mercy. When any game was started, a continual fire was kept up along the line; and, if a herd of antelopes was discovered, the elephants halted, and the cavalry hemmed them in, that his Highness and his courtiers might leisurely destroy them. Proceeding in this manner by day, and halting in the evening at appointed stations, where every luxury was prepared in sumptuous tents, the army at length approached the Thibet Mountains, where tigers, panthers, leopards, and buffaloes were to be found. An encampment being formed, their sporting was continued for several weeks upon a grand and formidable scale; and, mounted upon their elephants, the prince and his nobles scoured the country in pursuit of the ferocious beasts that destroyed the flocks and herds of the peasantry. The array of despotism was here of some service, for the numbers of carnivorous animals that were killed was generally in proportion to the magnitude of the force employed against them.” The curious uses to which elephants have been put are endless. An English officer, who served in India, says, “I have myself seen the wife of a mahout [for the followers often take their families with them to camp] give a baby in charge of an elephant while she went on some business, and have been highly amused in observing the sagacity and care of the unwieldy nurse. The child, which, like most children, did not like to lie still in one position, would, as soon as left to itself, begin crawling about, in which exercise it would probably get among the legs of the animal, or entangled in the branches of the trees on which he was feeding; when the elephant would, in the most tender manner, disengage his charge, either by lifting it out of the way with his trunk, or by removing the impediments to its free progress. If the child had crawled to such a distance as to verge upon the limits of his range [for the animal was chained by the leg to a peg driven into the ground], he would stretch out his trunk, and lift it back as gently as possible to the spot whence it had started.”