his naked hand into the water and brings forth a handful of each kind, dry as when he put them in.  A simple enough trick, no doubt, to the initiated; but the old conjurer’s arm is bared, and the tin is, as far as I can discover, but an ordinary vessel, and the trick is performed without any cover, table, or cloth.  After this he expectorates a number of glass marbles, and ends with a couple of solid iron jingal balls that he can scarce get out of his mouth.  There is no mistake about their being of solid iron, and the old conjurer opens his mouth and lets me see them emerging from his throat.  From what I see him do as the final act, and which there is no deception about, I am inclined to think the old fellow has actually acquired the power of swallowing these jingal balls and reproducing them at pleasure.

After a number of tricks too familiar to justify mentioning here he covers his head with a cloth for a minute, and then reappears with brass eyeballs, with a small hole bored in the centre of each to represent the pupils; and his mouth is rendered hideous with a set of teeth belonging to some animal.  In this horrible make-up the old Hindoo tom-toms on a small oblong drum, while one of his assistants sings in broken English “Buffalo Gals.”  He then openly removes the false teeth, and taking out the brass eyeballs, he casts them jingling on the gravel at my feet.  They are simply hemispheres of sheet-brass, and fitted closely over the eyeballs, beneath the lids.  The conjurer’s eyes water visibly after the brass covers are removed; and well enough they might; there is no sleight-of-hand about this—­it is purely an act of self-torture.

In most of the conjuring tricks the conjurer would purposely make a partial failure in the first attempt; an assistant would then impart the necessary power by muttering cabalistic words over a monkey’s skull.

A mongoose had been tethered to a stake at the beginning of the performance, and the little ferret-like enemy of the snake family kept tugging at his tether and sniffing suspiciously about whenever snakes appeared in the conjurer’s manipulations.  He bad promised me a fight between the mongoose and a snake, and before presenting his little brass bowl for backsheesh he holds out a four-foot snake toward the eager little animal at the stake.  The snake writhes and struggles to get away, evidently badly scared at the prospect of an encounter with the mongoose; but the man succeeds in depositing him within his adversary’s reach.  The mongoose nabs him by the neck in an instant, and would no doubt soon have finished him; but the assistants part them with wire crooks, putting the snake in a basket with several others and the mongoose in another.