So had he sat a fortnight, touching neither food nor drink. The lady of the house disputed a debt claimed by him in the name of an ancestor. She bade him sue, but he, wise man, preferred this method. At the moment he was only just alive, and his wits seemed to have preceded him to the new genesis. We called him back, with kind words and chinking of money under the trunk of the Luck-Bringer himself. It was the money I think that reached him on the Border Land. He laughed for joy and wept many salt tears into his first spare meal of rice and watery pulse; but the family borrowed more money to make a great feast because the house was saved from a Curse! Another variety of compelling your desire is the burning of a cow or an old woman. While, for a woman, the simplest way is the time-honoured custom of sulking. Early Indian domestic architecture provides for this. There was always a sulking-room in the “Inside” (compare _boudoir_), and here sat the woman who insisted on her own way; and here no doubt came husband or father with gift of shawl or toe-ring to release her.... My wise ones tell me many stories as we sit on the roof in the hour between the Twilights. But the story of my Wisest one herself is one of my favourites. You must know that she is a very holy woman indeed. At her birth, so many years ago that her devotees bring you data to prove her a hundred years old, it was prophesied that she would be “a religious,” and her Father built her a Shrine, and taught her things which only Priests may know. She can perform every _jog_, and can read one’s thoughts in any language. Her face is the face of her who has attained, and her dignity and self-poise I have nowhere seen surpassed. She dresses oddly--the sex of the devotee must not be proclaimed--in the nether garments of a man, _i.e._, loose white drapery about the legs, and a long coat. Her hair is worn in coils on the top of her head, and round her neck hang sacred beads, and Kali’s necklet of skulls in gold and enamel work. To her the symbol is not gruesome. Kali, she will tell you, was the power of God, the “Energy of the Gods,” and the heads represent the Giants of wickedness whom she has slain.