‘Truly, iya,’ he said to the púsári as he departed, ‘you have much to be thankful for. Only by the favour of Púliya have you escaped from the wiles of the pisásis, and from the snare that Iyan Elúvan laid for you. ’Tis well, indeed, to be a favourite of the god. May you be happy and prosper!’ Before many days, Valan and Vallee were married, and went to live in an adjoining village. Relieved by the death of his enemy from constant worry and irritation, the púsári’s temper greatly improved. In course of time he became so much respected and so popular, that he was elected headman of the district. The secrets he learned when he wandered about the village invisible, proved to be of great value to him, as he was often able to turn his knowledge to account in his dealings with his fellow-villagers. He became in time a man of substance. The púsári’s adventure was the subject of conversation through the whole country round for many weeks, and for a long time not a man, woman, or child dared enter the jungle after nightfall. But though in course of time the fear of the pisásis wore off, and on several occasions villagers were lost in the forest and wandered about there all night, no one ever found again the Haunted Jungle. A STICK OF INDIAN INK. Amongst familiar things that are of comparatively recent introduction we must include that artistic article inaccurately known as Indian ink. Even when the seventeenth century was more than half-spent, it was a rarity; and in the folio volume, published in 1672, descriptive of the Museo Moscarda, there is an engraving of a stick of Indian ink, which was included with some ‘giants’ teeth’—in reality mammoth bones—as amongst the chief curiosities of the collection. Notwithstanding its usual English name of ‘Indian ink,’ it is a Chinese manufacture. M. Maurice Jametel, a careful and accomplished French scholar, has compiled from Chinese sources an interesting monograph on its history and manufacture (_L’Encre de Chine, d’après des Documents Chinois_, traduits par M. Jametel: Paris, 1882). The historians of the Celestial kingdom, according to their usual custom in dealing with the affairs of their own land, attribute high antiquity to the use of ink; they say that it was invented by Tien-tchen, who flourished somewhere between 2697 and 2597 B.C. The Chinese at the time made use of a lacquer which was spread upon silk by the help of bamboo sticks. That, at least, is one interpretation of certain passages as to bamboo books. Next we are told that they used a sort of black stone, to which water was applied.