I recalled her volubility of speech when I first met her, and her impassioned song, by which she won for her mistress the acknowledgment of a deep and undying love; and I asked myself the question over and over again, "Is it possible that she can be acting?" At a signal, an alarm-gong was struck, and so suddenly and immediately behind her that the whole assembly started, and May-Peâh, taken by surprise, turned to see whence the sound came. "Now," shouted the wily judges, "it is plain that you can speak, for you are not deaf." No sooner was this said than the feeling against the accused ran high, on account of her obstinacy, and she was forthwith condemned to all the tortures of the rack. But the humane yogi, on hearing this, raised his bare arms on high, and uttered the wild cry of "Yah" (forbear) so commandingly that it rang through the temple, and arrested the cruel process. He then turned to the poor girl, and, placing his huge, bony hands upon her shoulders, tenderly whispered in her ear something which seemed to move the prisoner for she raised her burning eyes, now filled with tears, to his face, and, shaking her head solemnly and sadly to and fro, laid her finger on her mouth to indicate that she could not speak. A tender light kindled the dark face of the yogi, as he informed the assembly that "the woman was not a witch, nor even obstinate, but powerless to speak, because under the influence of witchcraft." The tide of feeling was again turned in the prisoner's favor. "Let her be exorcised," said the chief judge of the Supreme Court, whose secretary was making minutes of all that took place during the trial. On which the queerest-looking woman of the party, an old and toothless dame, drew out a key from her girdle and opened the wooden boxes, from which she took a small boat, a sort of coracle,[39]--such as are still found in some parts of Wales, made by covering a wicker frame with leather,--a long gray veil of singular texture, an earthen stove, whereon to kindle a charcoal fire, and some charcoal; out of the second box she produced some herbs, pieces of flint, cast skins of snakes, feathers, the hair of various animals, with dead men's bones, short brooms, and a host of other queer things. At any other time I should have been highly amused at the grotesqueness of the figure, and the comically ludicrous manner in which she drew, one after another, her mysterious ingredients out of her boxes; but now I was too anxious, and too much pained by the situation of May-Peâh, and by what seemed to me diabolical jugglery, to think of the comical side of the scene.