The operations of the men-sorcerers are less spontaneous and more scientific. They set about their work in a business-like way; and within sight of the house of their intended victim the mystic caldron begins to boil and bubble. The victim, however, is not to be terrified out of his senses. What are his enemy's fires and incantations to him? He will only just take no notice, and continue to live on as if there was not a sorcerer in the world. But that smoke: it meets his eye the first object every morning. That ruddy glare: it is the last thing he sees at night. That measured but inarticulate sound: it is never out of his ear. His thoughts dwell on the mystical business. He is preoccupied even in company. He wonders what they are now putting into the pot; and whether it has any connection with the spasm that has just shot through him. He becomes nervous; he feels unwell; he cannot sleep for thinking; he cannot eat for that horrid broth that bubbles for ever in his mind. He gets worse, and worse, and worse. He dies! But this empire of the imagination is beaten hollow in Java, where it is supposed that a housebreaker, by throwing a handful of earth upon the beds of the inmates, completely incapacitates them from moving to save their property. And this is no mere speculative belief, but an actual _fact_. The man who is to be robbed, on feeling the earth fall upon him, lies as motionless as if he was bound hand and foot. He is under a spell; a spell which, in our own country, even knowledge and refinement have power only to modify.