Page:Wanderings of a Pilgrim Vol 2.djvu/276

 the hill, in charge of his groom; they met some mules laden with water-bags, where the path was narrow, the bank perpendicular on the one side, and the precipice on the other; the groom led the horse on the side of the precipice, he kicked at the mules, his feet descended over the edge of the road, and down he went—a dreadful fall, a horrible crash; the animal was dead ere he reached a spot where a tree stopped his further descent: the precipice is almost perpendicular.

22nd.—Found a glow-worm of immense size on the side of the hill: a winged glow-worm flew in, and alighted on the table; it is small, not a quarter the size of the other.

23rd.—During the night, some animal came into the verandah, killed one of the Moonāl hen pheasants, and wounded the cock bird so severely that he will die. There is a wild-beast track on the side of the hill opposite my house, along which I have several times seen some animal skulking in the dusk of the evening.

25th.—Accompanied some friends to breakfast in my cottage-tent at Cloud End. We laid out a garden, and sowed flower seeds around the spot where my little tent is pitched, beneath the trees; while thus employed, I found a scorpion among the moss and leaves where I was sitting, which induced me to repeat those lines of Byron:—

"The mind that broods o'er guilty woes Is like the scorpion girt by fire,— In circle narrowing as it glows, The flames around their captive close, Till, inly search'd by thousand throes, And maddening in her ire, One sad and sole relief she knows, The sting she nourish'd for her foes, Whose venom never yet was vain, Gives but one pang, and cures all pain, And darts into her desperate brain."

My memory was a source of woe to the scorpion at Bhadráj; they surrounded him with a circle of fire; as the heat annoyed him he strove to get over the circle, but the burning charcoal drove him back; at last, mad with pain, he drove his sting into