Possibly some spiritualists may take comfort in these anecdotes, and allege that the Maori mediums were ‘very powerful’.  This is said to have been the view taken by some American believers, in a very curious case, reported by Kohl, but the tale, as he tells it, cannot possibly be accurate.  However, it illustrates and strangely coincides with some stories related by the Jesuit, Pere Lejeune, in the Canadian Mission, about 1637.  The instances bear both on clairvoyance and on the force which is said to shake houses as well as to lift tables, in the legends of the modern thaumaturgists.  We shall take Kohl’s tale before those of the old Jesuit.  Kohl first describes the ‘Medicine Lodge,’ already alluded to in the account of Dene Hareskin magic.

The ‘lodge’ answers to what spiritualists call ‘the cabinet,’ usually a place curtained off in modern practice.  Behind this the medium now gets up his ‘materialisations,’ and other cheap mysteries.  The classical performers of the fourth century also knew the advantage of a close place, {45a} ’where the power would not be scattered’.  This idea is very natural, granting the ‘power’.  The modern Ojibway ‘close place,’ or lodge, like those seen by old Jesuit fathers, ’is composed of stout posts, connected with basket-work, and covered with birch bark.  It is tall and narrow, and resembles a chimney.  It is very firmly built, and two men, even if exerting their utmost strength, would be unable to move, shake, or bend it.’ {45b} On this topic Kohl received information from a gentleman who ’knew the Indians well, and was even related to them through his wife’.  He, and many other white people thirty years before, saw a Jossakeed, or medium, crawl into such a lodge as Kohl describes, beating his tambour.  ’The entire case began gradually trembling, shaking, and oscillating slowly amidst great noise. . . .  It bent back and forwards, up and down, like the mast of a vessel in a storm.  I could not understand how those movements could be produced by a man inside, as we could not have caused them from the exterior.’  Two voices, ‘both entirely different,’ were then heard within.  ‘Some spiritualists’ (here is the weakest part of the story) ‘who were present explained it through modern spiritualism.’  Now this was not before 1859, when Kohl’s book appeared in English, and modern spiritualism, as a sect of philosophy, was not born till 1848, so that, thirty years before 1859, in 1829, there were no modern spiritualists.  This, then, is absurd.  However, the tale goes on, and Kohl’s informant says that he knew the Jossakeed, or medium, who had become a Christian.  On his deathbed the white man asked him how it was done:  ’now is the time to confess all truthfully’.  The converted one admitted the premisses—­he was dying, a Christian man—­but, ’Believe me, I did not deceive you at that time.  I did not move the lodge.  It was shaken by the power of the spirits.  I could see a great distance round