the unqualified amazement of everybody, was found to be perfectly empty.”  All this is much in the usual style; but what followed was so much superior to the ordinary run of modern Indian jugglery that we must give it in the simple Siddeshur’s own words.  When every one was satisfied that the man had really disappeared, the principal performer, who did not seem to be at all astonished, told his audience that the vanished man had gone up to the heavens to fight Indra.  “In a few moments,” says Siddeshur, “he expressed anxiety at the man’s continued absence in the aerial regions, and said that he would go up to see what was the matter.  A boy was called, who held upright a long bamboo, up which the man climbed to the top, whereupon we suddenly lost sight of him, and the boy laid the bamboo on the ground.  Then there fell on the ground before us the different members of a human body, all bloody,—­first one hand, then another, a foot, and so on, until complete.  The boy then elevated the bamboo, and the principal performer, appearing on the top as suddenly as he had disappeared, came down, and seeming quite disconsolate, said that Indra had killed his friend before he could get there to save him.  He then placed the mangled remains in the same box, closed it, and tied it as before.  Our wonder and astonishment reached their climax when, a few minutes later, on the box being again opened, the man jumped out perfectly hearty and unhurt.”  Is not this rather a severe strain on one’s credulity, even for an Indian jugglery story?]

In Philostratus, again, we may learn the antiquity of some juggling tricks that have come up as novelties in our own day.  Thus at Taxila a man set his son against a board, and then threw darts tracing the outline of the boy’s figure on the board.  This feat was shown in London some fifteen or twenty years ago, and humorously commemorated in Punch by John Leech.

(Philostratus, Fr. Transl.  Bk.  III. ch. xv. and xxvii.; Mich.  Glycas, Ann.  II. 156, Paris ed.; Delrio, Disquis.  Magic. pp. 34, 100; Koeppen, I. 31, II. 82, 114-115, 260, 262, 280; Vassilyev, 156; Della Penna, 36; S.  Setzen, 43, 353; Pereg.  Quat. 117; I.  B. IV. 39 and 290 seqq.; Asiat.  Researches, XVII. 186; Valentyn, V. 52-54; Edward Melton, Engelsch Edelmans, Zeldzaame en Gedenkwaardige Zee en Land Reizen, etc., aangevangen in den Jaare 1660 en geendigd in den Jaare 1677, Amsterdam, 1702, p. 468; Mem. of the Emp.  Jahangueir, pp. 99, 102.)

[Illustration:  Grand Temple of Buddha at LHASA]