“His association with them had shown him much of their ordinary habits and some of their beliefs. I gathered from what he said that the basis of the Thuggee society is the worship of Bowhani, a frightful demon, whose highest joy is the sight of death or dead bodies. Those who are her disciples must offer up human victims killed without the shedding of blood, and the more he can kill the more of a saint he becomes. The motive for this is never gain, for they rarely plunder, but purely religious zeal. The reward is an immortality of bliss hereafter, which Bowhani will secure them; a life like that of the Mohammedan Paradise, where there are material joys to be possessed forever without satiety. Destruction, which begins as a kind of duty, becomes also at last, and naturally perhaps, an absorbing passion. As the hunter in pursuing his prey is carried away by excitement and the enthusiasm of the chase, or, in hunting the tiger, feels the delight of braving danger and displaying courage, so here that same passion is felt to an extraordinary degree, for it is men that must be pursued and destroyed. Here, in addition to courage, the hunter of man must call into exercise cunning, foresight, eloquence, intrigue. All this I afterward brought to the attention of the Government with very good results. “Potts declared that night and day he had been on the watch for a chance to escape, but so infernal was the cunning of these wretches, and so quick their senses, sharpened as they had been by long practice, that success became hopeless. He had fallen into deep dejection, and concluded that his only hope lay in the efforts of the Government to put down these assassins. Our appearance had at last saved him. “Neither I, nor any of my men, nor any Englishman who heard this story, doubted for an instant the truth of every word. All the newspapers mentioned with delight the fact that an Englishman and his son had been rescued. Pity was felt for that father who, for his son’s sake, had consented to dwell amidst scenes of terror, and sympathy for the anguish that he most have endured during that terrific captivity. A thrill of horror passed through all our Anglo-Indian society at the revelation which he made about Thuggee; and so great was the feeling in his favor that a handsome subscription was made up for him by the officers at Agra. “For my part I believed in him most implicitly, and, as I saw him to be unusually clever, I engaged him at once to be my servant. He staid with me, and every month won more and more of my confidence. He had a good head for business. Matters of considerable delicacy which I intrusted to him were well performed, and at last I thought it the most fortunate circumstance in my Indian life that I had found such a man. “After about three years he expressed a wish to go to England for the sake of his son. He thought India a bad place for a boy, and wished to try and start in some business in his native land for his son’s sake.