Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 126.djvu/524

 and fruits. A recent visitor relates as follows: " Around the tomb I saw some hundred women, and perhaps thirty men, with a few children, sitting on the ground, wagging their heads, shivering, weeping, and screaming. Their relatives were waiting on them. Some women had thrown off their ornaments, or had broken them. The friends of other of the women held them by the hair of their head, and called upon them to disclose the name of the demon who possessed them. The afflicted themselves would shout out as if addressing their tormentors, and would ask for what sacrificial inducement, or at what price, they would depart. It was a very wild scene. The custodians of the shrine, who may rightly be called priests, though they do not represent any distinct sacerdotal order, moved about, fumigating the possessed with incense, and accompanied by musicians beating loudly on drums. Sacred exorcisms were pronounced, papers with efficacious formulæ written on them were burnt under the noses of the afflicted, their hair was pulled, or, in obstinate cases, their bodies were well belaboured with drumsticks. The fervour with which one man assisted the exorcists with his private cane, in their endeavours to relieve a female, seemed to indicate the concealed payment of an old domestic score. Such virtue as belonged to the locality itself was said to extend as far as the point to which the beating of the drums could be heard."

A girl named Dulhir, who had recovered from her affection, thus related her experience. "Her demon," she said, "came from a lake named Dal, in Kashmeer, and was travelling southward when he was unlucky enough to meet a person wearing an armlet, on which was inscribed the Holy Name. Fire issued out of the centre, and would have consumed the evil spirit, but he adroitly jumped down a well. The unfortunate girl Dulhir happened to be drawing water at the very time: the demon saw her, and remaining quiet all the day, tracked her home at night. From that moment she was possessed. Her visit to the shrine was, however quite successful. It was lighted at the time, and the effulgence gradually overcame her tyrannnical incumbent, and in the end he left her perfectly free from ailment and distress. Whilst he was departing, however, she lay on the ground, writhing her body, and striking the dusty road with her hands." A story was told at the place of a woman who had been brought there, whose malady was displayed by her reading Arabic. Even as she sat at the tomb, she contrived to recite, as she perused, passages in a celebrated poem attributed to the pen of Abdul Kadir himself. A sudden voice from within the shrine commanded her to desist, and she returned to her home, cured and illiterate.

It would be a comical sight in this London of ours, if we could have a pen at one of the fancy fairs filled with all the hysterical people: the old ladies who shriek if their parrot has a fit, or their lap-dog is threatened with asthma; the gushing spinsters whose eyes brim with delicious brine, and whose noses instinctively flutter towards the smelling-bottle when their popular preacher dilates on the transcendental poetry of the unseen; the habitual invalids who have their sinkings and their sighings, their nerves and their nips; the hypochondriacs who weigh themselves after eating, analyze their drinking-water, and go to bed when the wind is in the east; the young gentlemen who languish through their lyric verse, drink in the moonlight, talk æsthetical criticism, and go into ecstasies over "the sustained treble of a Limoges plate," or the delicate harmony of "a serenade in blues." Really, perhaps, the drumsticks might be found a salutary remedy for each and all!

 

 , which was formerly one of the chief coffee-producing countries, has of late years almost entirely ceased to grow the plant. The capabilities of the island, however, are apparently so great, not only for the cultivation of coffee, but also for many other food products, that the attention of the authorities has been directed to the matter, and the result is that Mr. Prestoe, of the Botanic Gardens, Trinidad, has been commissioned to examine and report on the prospects of the island generally, and the best means of developing its resources. We anxiously await the details of Mr. Prestoe's report upon an island so fertile and beautiful as Dominica, but which has, no doubt, through want of European capital and energy, been allowed to drift almost into an unprofitable waste.