was a sufficient confession that the
Theosophists receded from a proposal to test all these things,
including the handwriting of the letters, before a law court, for
which the Coulombs were eager. The result was that Madame Blavatsky
left India and established herself in London.

[4] Commissioner Grant was awakened by a telegram and requested
to look for a cigarette in a certain part of the Prince of
Wales' statue, in Bombay; he went and found nothing. Mrs.
Coulomb now says she was Madame B----'s confederate, and that
she was afraid of being taken up as a lunatic if she climbed
to the unicorn's horn where the cigarette was to be placed.
So she said the rain must have washed it away. Madame
Blavatsky showed mental weakness in not considering the
difficulties, and her fondness for cigarettes made her set
them too high in dignity as well as position.

At the very time that I was at Adyar, and despite a certain repugnance
to "occultism," sympathetically appreciating the serene harmony of the
Theosophists in their beautiful retreat amid the palms, the place was
turbid with discord, Madame Blavatsky at one end of the table and the
Coulombs at the other were even then in mortal combat. I have often
marvelled at the self-possession of the woman under the suspended
sword that presently fell.

The most curious thing about this turbaned Spiritualism is its
development of the Koothoomi myth. I asked Sir W. W. Hunter,
Gazetteer-General of India, and other orientalists, about the name of
this alleged Mahatma, or Rabat, and they declared Koothoomi to be
without analogies in any Hindu tongue, ancient or modern. I was
assured on good authority that the name was originally "Cotthume," and
a mere mixture of Ol-_cott_ and _Hume_, Madame Blavatsky's principal
adherents. Out of Madame's jest was evolved this incredible being, who
performed the part allotted to the aboriginal "John King" in America.
Sumangala, chief priest of the Buddhist world, though not unfriendly
to Theosophy, told me that it was a belief among them that there had
been Rahats in the early world. I gathered from him and others that
they are thought of as Enoch, Seth, Elias, etc., are in Christendom.
The Coulomb story is that a pasteboard doll, with half-shrouded head,
superimposed on the shoulders of Mr. Coulomb, himself orientally
draped, moved about in the dusk at Adyar wh