ferred himself several
hundred miles in a single night over a country where there were no
railroads, and never took the trouble to explain how his journey
was accomplished.

The best conjurers, magicians and palmists in India are fakirs.
Many of them tell fortunes from the lines of the hand and from
other signs with extraordinary accuracy. Old residents who have
come in contact with this class relate astounding tales. While
at Calcutta a young lady at our hotel was incidentally informed
by a fortune-telling fakir she met accidentally in a Brahmin
temple that she would soon receive news that would change all
her plans and alter the course of her life, and the next morning
she received a cablegram from England announcing the death of
her father. If you get an old resident started on such stories
he will keep telling them all night.

Of course you have read of the incredible and seemingly impossible
feats performed by Hindu magicians, of whom the best and most
skillful belong to the fakir class. I have seen the "box trick,"
or "basket trick," as they call it, in which a young man is tied
up in a gunny sack and locked up in a box, then at a signal a
few moments after appears smiling at the entrance to your house,
but I have never found anyone who could explain how he escaped
from his prison. This was performed daily on the Midway Plaisance
at the World's Fair at Chicago and was witnessed by thousands
of people. And it is simple compared with some of the doings
of these fakirs. They will take a mango, open it before you,
remove the seeds, plant them in a tub of earth, and a tree will
grow and bear fruit before your eyes within half an hour. Or,
what is even more wonderful, they will climb an invisible rope
in the open air as high as a house, vanish into space, and then,
a few minutes after, will come smiling around the nearest street
corner. Or, if that is not wonderful enough, they will take an
ordinary rope, whirl it around their head, toss it into the air,
and it will stand upright, as if fastened to some invisible bar,
so taut and firm that a heavy man can climb it.

These are a few of the wonderful things fakirs perform about
the temples, and nobody has ever been able to discover how they
do it. People who begin an inquiry usually abandon it and declare
that the tricks are not done at all, that the spectators are simply
hypnotized and imagine that they have seen what they afterward
describe. This explanation is en