'Forward, forward!' and by the time I reached the village the people had always run away." Though the Lushais were able to turn the Thados and other clans of their own kindred out of their possessions, yet when they came in contact with the Chins they were invariably defeated. In 1881 a large force of Southern Lushais raided Bunkhua, a Chin village to the north of the Tao hill. They burnt the village without much trouble, but the Chins refused to acknowledge this as a defeat and kept up a hot fire on their assailants, killing one of their bravest warriors. When the Lushais set out on their return journey they found the whole country up, and in a gorge they were greeted with a volley which laid forty of them low, and the remainder fled in all directions, and, had it not been for heavy rain, which washed away the bloodstains and made tracking difficult, but few would have reached their homes. Although when fighting among themselves the ambushing of cultivators and travellers was disapproved of, they resorted to it freely when fighting us, but our casualties were not very great, as the ambushers were so anxious about their own safety they generally fired too soon. These ambushes were always arranged below the road, where the ground fell away very sharply, and, having fired, the brave fellows hurled themselves down the hill, ignoring all cuts and scratches in their anxiety to escape. Head-hunting.--It used to be considered that all inhabitants of these Hills were head-hunters. In fact, so great an authority as Colonel Lewin derives the name "Lushai" from "lu," "a head," and "sha," "to cut." This, of course, is a mistake, as the name of the clan is not Lushai, but Lushei, and though "sha" does mean "to cut," it does not mean "to cut off," and could not be used of cutting off a man's head; but that such a mistake should have been possible shows how firmly rooted was the belief that head-hunting was one of the peculiarities of the population of these Hills. I believe that as far as the Lushais and their kindred clans are concerned, head-hunting was not indulged in. By this I mean that parties did not go out simply to get heads. Of course, a man who had killed his man was thought more highly of than one who had not, and, therefore, when a man did kill a person he brought the head home to show that he was speaking the truth; but the raids were not made to get heads, but for loot and slaves. The killing and taking of heads were merely incidents in the raid, not the cause of it. I think that the Chins or Pois are an exception to this, and, as far as I can gather, the glory of bringing in a head was sufficient to send a young man and his friends off on the raid.