“I don’t say it is not natural, because we don’t know what all the natural laws are, but I say that some of the things I have seen certainly are not to be accounted for by anything we do know. It is not often that the jugglers show their best tricks to the whites--they know that, as a rule, we are altogether skeptical; but I have seen at native courts more than once the most astounding things--things absolutely incomprehensible and inexplicable. I don’t suppose we are going to see anything of that sort tonight, though Mrs. Hunter said in her note that they had heard from the native servant that this man was a famous one. “There is a sect of people in India, I don’t mean a caste, but a sort of secret society, who, I believe, claim to be able by some sort of influence to suspend altogether the laws of nature. I do not say that I believe them--as a scientific man, it is my duty not to believe them; but I have seen such things done by some of the higher class of jugglers, and that under circumstances that did not seem to admit of the possibility of deception, that I am obliged to suspend my judgment, which, as you may imagine, my dear, is exceedingly annoying to me; but some of them do possess to a considerable extent what the Scotch call second sight, that is to say, the power of foreseeing events in the future. Of that I am morally certain; I have seen proofs of it over and over again. For example, once an old fakir, whom I had cured of a badly ulcerated limb, came up just as I was starting on a shooting expedition. “‘Do not go out today,’ he said. ‘I foresee evil for you. I saw you last night brought back badly wounded.’ “‘But if I don’t go your dream will come wrong,’ I said. “He shook his head. “‘You will go in spite of what I say,’ he said; ‘and you will suffer, and others too;’ and he looked at a group of shikaris, who were standing together, ready to make a start. “‘How many men are there?’ he said. “‘Why, six of course,’ I replied. “‘I see only three,’ he said, ‘and three dull spots. One of those I see is holding his matchlock on his shoulder, another is examining his priming, the third is sitting down by the tire. Those three will come back at the end of the day; the other three will not return alive.’ “I felt rather uncomfortable, but I wasn’t, as I said to myself--I was a good deal younger then, my dear--such a fool as to be deterred from what promised to be a good day’s sport by such nonsense as this; and I went. “We were going after a rogue elephant that had been doing a lot of damage among the natives’ plantations. We found him, and a savage brute he turned out to be. He moved just as I fired, and though I hit him, it was not on the fatal spot, and he charged right down among us. He caught the very three men the fakir said were doomed, and dashed the life out of them; then he came at me. The bearer had run off with my second gun, and he seized me and flung me up in the air.