“He had a piteous story to tell. He said that his name was John Potts, that he belonged to Southampton, and had been in India a year. He had come to Agra to look out for employ as a servant, and had been caught by the Thugs. They offered to spare his life if he would join them. According to him they always make this offer. If it had only been himself that was concerned he said that he would have died a hundred times rather than have accepted; but his little boy was with him, and to save his life he consented, hoping that somehow or other he might escape. They then received him with some horrible ceremonies, and marked on his arm and on the arm of his son, on the inner part of the right elbow, the name of Bowhani in Hindu characters. Potts showed me his arm and that of his son in proof of this. “He had been with them, according to his own account, about three months, and his life had been one continuous horror. He had picked up enough of their language to conjecture to some extent the nature of their belief, which, he asserted, would be most important information for the Government. The Thugs had treated him very kindly, for they looked upon him as one of themselves, and they are all very humane and affectionate to one another. His worst fear had been that they would compel him to do murder; and he would have died, he declared, rather than consent; but, fortunately, he was spared. The reason of this, he said, was because they always do their murder by strangling, since the shedding of blood is not acceptable to their divinity. He could not do this, for it requires great dexterity. Almost all their strangling is done by a thin, strong cord, curiously twisted, about six feet in length, with a weight at one end, generally carved so as to represent the face of Bowhani. This they throw with a peculiar jerk around the neck of their victim. The weight swings the cord round and round, while the strangler pulls the other end, and death is inevitable. His hands, he said, were coarse and clumsy, unlike the delicate Hindu hands; and so, although they forced him to practice incessantly, he could not learn. He said nothing about the boy, but, from what I saw of that boy afterward, I believe that nature created him especially to be a Thug, and have no doubt that he learned then to wield the cord with as much dexterity as the best strangler of them all.