Excerpt from Thirteen Years Among the Wild Beasts of India: Their Haunts and Habits From Personal Observations; With an Account of the Modes and Capturing and Taming Elephants I landed in Madras in 1864, and proceeded to a station in the Mysore country where I had friends. I was fresh from school and looked with delight upon the prospect of a coffee-planter's life, in which I had been promised a start by a friend, himself a planter. But coffee was in one of the vicissitudes with which that enterprise seems so frequently to be struggling - at least my friend's estate was - and before I had completed a voyage round the Cape he had been eaten out by the "borer" insect, or his prospects had shared the blight at that time affecting his trees' leaves - I forget which. My hopes of a jungle-life seemed to be doomed; my vision of wild elephants, tigers, and bison to be hopelessly dispelled! However, in a month or two a friend who was engaged in prosecuting some surveys for Government took me with him, and in the next six months I learnt a little of the country and surveying, and a good deal about duck and antelope shooting. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.