d hearing the muttered objurgations
of the hag, as he turned round to apologise, he was not surprised to
find the juice of the cane turned into blood. The spectators,
likewise, recognised the metamorphosis as soon as it was pointed out
to them; and when the terrified victim instantly leaped on his horse,
and put ten or twelve miles between him and the sorceress before
drawing bridle, he was believed to have saved his life by this
dispatch.

The operations of the men-sorcerers are less spontaneous and more
scientific. They set about their work in a business-like way; and
within sight of the house of their intended victim the mystic caldron
begins to boil and bubble. The victim, however, is not to be terrified
out of his senses. What are his enemy's fires and incantations to him?
He will only just take no notice, and continue to live on as if there
was not a sorcerer in the world. But that smoke: it meets his eye the
first object every morning. That ruddy glare: it is the last thing he
sees at night. That measured but inarticulate sound: it is never out
of his ear. His thoughts dwell on the mystical business. He is
preoccupied even in company. He wonders what they are now putting into
the pot; and whether it has any connection with the spasm that has
just shot through him. He becomes nervous; he feels unwell; he cannot
sleep for thinking; he cannot eat for that horrid broth that bubbles
for ever in his mind. He gets worse, and worse, and worse. He dies!

But this empire of the imagination is beaten hollow in Java, where it
is supposed that a housebreaker, by throwing a handful of earth upon
the beds of the inmates, completely incapacitates them from moving to
save their property. And this is no mere speculative belief, but an
actual _fact_. The man who is to be robbed, on feeling the earth fall
upon him, lies as motionless as if he was bound hand and foot. He is
under a spell; a spell which, in our own country, even knowledge and
refinement have power only to modify.

In England, there is a large class of persons who believe that a
certain pill is able to cure all diseases, however opposite their
natures, and however different the constitutions of the patients. It
is in vain the analytical chemist describes publicly the component
parts and real qualities of the quack medicine--their faith is
unshaken. In India, this low and paltry credulity acquires a character
of the poetical; for there the popular confidence reposes-