“‘This is the occasion of your seeking, Mother,’ he said. ‘That rich man is known to me. I will hurt him--but not much--for this poor man’s sake.’” She smiled again whimsically. “I was in the body--what would you? It was wrong: but I consented. “So the holy man sent for a little dust from off the feet of the rich man, and with the help of this, and some earth and flour, he made an image, saying _mantras_ the while; but the most powerful mantras said he over five nails lying in the bottom of a pot. “‘Now,’ he said, ‘the curse is ready; but first go and see the rich man. Is he well? bring me news.’ “So I went, even as I was bid, and I sat in the courtyard and saw for mine own self that he was well, and vaunting himself in his health and riches. “It was dusk when I returned and made my report. ‘Then here begins the magic,’ said the holy man; and taking one of the nails he had cursed, he drove it with many more curses into the knee of the image. “‘A little curse,’ he said, ‘only a little curse in a good cause: but he shall feel it.’ “And I ran back to the great house and found all in confusion--servants running for doctors, Priests reciting prayers.... ‘The Master was sick unto death,’ they told me. We waited that night; and in the dawn hour, I, being holy myself and privileged, went to the rich man and told him as he lay in agony, that to my mind, not the doctor, but expiation would cure him. “‘What!’ he said, startled, for his sins I think were not few, ‘must I bear penalty in this life, when I am willing to carry my burden in the next.’ ‘Oh! a small matter,’ I suggested; ‘something easy of expiation. Think--a wrong perhaps to some private or Temple servant.’ But he remembered nothing. So I, pretending I had seen the thing in a dream, told him, and instantly the threader of garlands was sent for and honoured with gifts and feastings. When the holy man heard of this he took the nail from the rich man’s knee and he recovered immediately.... Yes, I believe in curses. But they are not good, they belong to the things of the body.” “_Sitting dharna_” is the Curse Coercive. I thought the practice extinct, till last year I found a half-mad thing mechanically telling his beads in a Raj courtyard of my acquaintance, as he sat beside the image of Ganesh the luck-bringer, under the pipal tree where lay the offerings of red and yellow flowers and sacred grass-tufts. It was midday and he sat bareheaded in the sun, unkempt, unshaven, blear-eyed.