We assisted one day at the representation of the Fakirs, a Hindustan religious sect given over to the mortification of the flesh. It was an impressive spectacle. The Fakirs, arrayed in white flowing garments of doubtful cleanness, were sitting in a semi-circle on the floor, holding banners and singing religious chants. Their “mollah,” wearing an enormous turban, sat in the centre. Suddenly the tom-toms rolled like thunder and the experiments began. The Fakirs did amazing things. One of them, clad in a sort of white sack with five openings through which passed his head, legs and arms, began to light the sacred fire to the accompaniment of a flute and tambourine, bending over the burning coals into which he threw some essence in order to get dizzy. The barbaric music, struck up faster and a long convulsive shudder shook the Fakir’s limbs. Then he took a heated spade and applied it to his arms and face and put his fingers into the brazier, making disorderly jumps, after which he fell on the floor with foam in the corners of his mouth. But it was only a prelude to more horrors. The Fakir who came next terrified me still more by his shouts and wild gestures. He pricked his tongue, lips, cheeks and ears with a long iron spear, and stepped barefooted on the sharp sides of a sword, after which, in a state of wild excitement, he stabbed himself with a poniard, and the blood ran down in abundance. The third Fakir twisted a large serpent round his body and ate a part of it, and then swallowed a scorpion, which the manager had previously shown to the audience. Now came the turn of the last Fakir, who grilled his skin with red hot irons, and made his eyes bulge out of its sockets with the end of a dagger and slowly rolled the eye back into its ordinary position again. Professor Charcot, the celebrated psychologist, who had controlled the experiment, was convinced that it was not a fraud. Sergy essayed a trip in the “Ballon Captif,” which lifted ten persons at a time a hundred metres higher than the Eiffel Tower. From below I breathlessly watched the ascent. Sergy was presented with a medal bearing the inscription: “_Souvenir de mon ascension_.” Another day we went to see “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West,” where a troup of “Red Skins” attacked a caravan of travellers, after which they scalped them and showed dramatically all the horrors described by Mayne Reid. Suddenly the Cowboys, with pistols bulging from their belts, came galloping on and drove away the Red Indians.