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The form assumed by superstition in India is not very different from the European type, otherwise than in a certain exaggeration, impressed on it, no doubt, by the grotesque grandeur of the mythology. Witchcraft is pretty nearly the same in both regions—the old women being the chief professors of the art; but in many districts of the former country, the evil power is bestowed upon every old woman without exception. Girls will not marry into a family without a witch, for how could their infants be protected from the spells of the other old women? It is dangerous to jostle an old woman on the street, however accidentally, lest she take vengeance on the spot. A man came into this unpleasant contact while he was walking along, carelessly chewing a piece of sugar-cane; and hearing the muttered objurgations of the hag, as he turned round to apologise, he was not surprised to find the juice of the cane turned into blood. The spectators, likewise, recognised the metamorphosis as soon as it was pointed out to them; and when the terrified victim instantly leaped on his horse, and put ten or twelve miles between him and the sorceress before drawing bridle, he was believed to have saved his life by this dispatch.

The operations of the men-sorcerers are less spontaneous and more scientific. They set about their work in a business-like way; and within sight of the house of their intended victim the mystic caldron begins to boil and bubble. The victim, however, is not to be terrified out of his senses. What are his enemy's fires and incantations to him? He will only just take no notice, and continue to live on as if there was not a sorcerer in the world. But that smoke: it meets his eye the first object every morning. That ruddy glare: it is the last thing he sees at night. That measured but inarticulate sound: it is never out of his ear. His thoughts dwell on the mystical business. He is preoccupied even in company. He wonders what they are now putting into the pot; and whether it has any connection with the spasm that has just shot through him. He becomes nervous; he feels unwell; he cannot sleep for thinking; he cannot eat for that horrid broth that bubbles for ever in his mind. He gets worse, and worse, and worse. He dies!

But this empire of the imagination is beaten hollow in Java, where it is supposed that a housebreaker, by throwing a handful of earth upon the beds of the inmates, completely incapacitates them from moving to save their property. And this is no mere speculative belief, but an actual fact. The man who is to be robbed, on feeling the earth fall upon him, lies as motionless as if he was bound hand and foot. He is under a spell; a spell which, in our own country, even knowledge and refinement have power only to modify.

In England, there is a large class of persons who believe that a certain pill is able to cure all diseases, however opposite their natures, and however different the constitutions of the patients. It is in vain the analytical chemist describes publicly the component parts and real qualities of the quack medicine—their faith is unshaken. In India, this low and paltry credulity acquires a character of the poetical; for there the popular confidence reposes—not more irrationally—on the prayers and incantations of the practitioner. But this sort of practice, in the wilder parts of the country, renders the medical profession somewhat unsafe to its professors; for the doctor is looked upon as a wizard, with power to cure or kill as he chooses. In such places—the jungly districts—there are diseases of the liver and spleen, to which the children, more especially, are subject; and when so affected, the patient pines away and dies without any external token of disease. This result is, of course, attributed to preternatural means; and if there is not an old woman at hand obnoxious to suspicion, the doctor is set down as the murderer. 'I have in these territories,' says Colonel Sleeman, 'known a great many instances of medical practitioners being put to death for not curing young people for whom they were required to prescribe. Several cases have come before me as a magistrate, in which the father has stood over the doctor with a drawn sword, by the side of the bed of his child, and cut him down, and killed him the moment the child died, as he had sworn to do when he found the patient sinking under his prescriptions.'

Another superstition of the country, originating no doubt in local circumstances, found its way into Europe, where no such circumstances existed. In India, a man suddenly vanishes. His family, perhaps, are expecting him at home, but from that moment he is never more heard of. He has been destroyed in the jungle by a tiger, and his remains so completely devoured by other animals, that there is scarcely a relic of his body left to give assurance of a man, far less as a proof of his identity. These mysterious disappearances, however, are connected with their real cause; and men are believed to be frequently metamorphosed—sometimes voluntarily, sometimes involuntarily—into tigers. The voluntary transformation is effected merely by eating a certain root, whereupon the man is instantly changed into a tiger; and when tired of his new character, he has only to eat another, when, presto! he subsides from a tiger into a man. But occasionally mistakes happen. An individual of an inquiring disposition once felt a strong curiosity to know what were the sensations attendant on such a transformation; but being a prudent person, he set about the experiment with all necessary precaution. Having provided himself with

he gave one likewise to his wife, desiring her to stand by and watch the event, and as soon as she saw him fairly turned into a tiger, to thrust it into his mouth. The wife promised, but her nerves were not equal to the performance. As soon as she saw her husband fixed in his new form, she took to flight—carrying in her hand, in the confusion of her mind, the root that would have restored him to her faithful arms! And so it befell that the poor man-tiger was obliged to take to the woods, where for many a day he dined on his old neighbours of the village, till he was at length shot, and recognised! In this superstition will be seen the prototype of the wolf-mania of mediÆval Europe. In Brittany, men betook themselves to the forests in the shape of wolves, out of a morbid passion for the amusement of howling and ravening; but if they left in some secure place the clothes they had thrown off to prepare for the metamorphosis, they had only to reassume them in order to regain their natural forms. But sometimes a catastrophe like the above occurred: the wife discovered the hidden clothes, and carrying them home in the innocent carefulness of her heart, the poor husband lived and died a wolf.

The Hindoos, like other ancient peoples, predict good or evil fortune from certain phenomena of nature; but one instance of this has been described to us in a communication from our Old Indian, which far excels in the poetical the finest fancies of the Greeks. We cannot undertake to say that the thing is new, although we ourselves never heard of it before; but as the knowledge of it was imparted to her by her moonshee as a profound secret, we present it as such to our readers, recommending them to make the experiment for themselves. At the initiation of our informant, she was about to undertake a distant journey, and the old moonshee was anxious to consult the fates as to the fortunes that might be in store for his beloved mistress. He, accordingly, prevailed upon her to walk forth one night from the veranda, and with many quaint expressions of respect and anxiety, besought her to follow his directions with an attentive mind, abstracted as much as possible from the common thoughts of life.

It was a clear, calm night; the moon was full, and not the faintest speck in the sky disturbed her reign. The Ganges was like a flood of silver light, hastening on in charmed silence; while on the green smooth sward on which they walked, a tall shrub, here and there, stood erect and motionless. The young lady, whose impressions were probably deepened by the mystical words of the moonshee, felt a kind of awe stealing over her: she looked round upon the accustomed scene, as if in some new and strange world; and when the old man motioned her to stop, as they reached an open space on the sward, she obeyed with an indescribable thrill.

'Look there,' said he, pointing to her shadow, which fell tall and dark upon the grass. 'Do you see it?'

'Yes,' said she faintly, yet beginning to be ashamed. 'How sharply defined are its edges! It looks like something you could touch.'

'But look longer—look better—look steadfastly. Is it still so definite?'

'A kind of halo begins to gather round it: my eyes dazzle'——

'Then raise them to the heavens; fix them on yonder blue sky. What do you see?'

'I see it still! But it is as white as mist, and of a gigantic size.'

'Has it a head?' asked the moonshee in an anxious whisper.

'Yes; it is complete in all its parts: but now it melts—floats—disappears.'

'Thank God!' said the old man: 'your journey shall be prosperous—such is the will of Heaven!' The experiment was tried on many other occasions by the young lady, and always with similar success, although never without a certain degree of trepidation, even after she had learned that the spectral appearance in the heavens was nothing more than the picture retained on the retina of the eye. She never saw the phantom without a head, which accounts for her being alive to this day; or even wanting a limb, although she has not been without her share of the trials of the world. It can easily be conceived, however, that certain conditions of the atmosphere may produce these phenomena, which are regarded by the Hindoo seer as sure tokens of death or disaster.

This superstition is not more unreasonable than the mistakes of our early travellers, who were accustomed to attribute a meaning to the phenomena of nature, of which more accurate knowledge has entirely stripped them. But the notions of the Hindoo are always peculiar—his fancy, even in its wildest excursions, is bounded by the circle of his mythology. When our Old Indian's wanderings led her to Pinang, in the Straits of Malacca, she found a Hindoo convict there, trembling even in his chains as his fancy connected the wonders of the place with the dogmas in which he had been reared. This most beautiful island, as our readers may remember, came into the possession of an Englishman in the latter part of last century in rather a romantic way—forming the dowry of a native princess, the daughter of the king of Quedah, whom he married. Captain Light transferred it to the East India Company, who were not slow in discovering the advantages of its fine harbour, rich soil, and salubrious climate. Its inhabitants at that time were a few fishermen on the coast; and the interior was covered with an almost impervious forest; but now there is a population of Europeans and Americans, and Asiatics of almost all countries; and plantations of sugar, coffee, pepper, and other intertropical produce. Among the inhabitants are invalids, who proceed thither from continental India for the restoration of their health; and convicts, who are compelled to compensate by their labour the injuries they have inflicted on society.

The man alluded to belonged to the latter class, having probably travelled for his country's good from the tamer lowlands of Bengal; and when the traveller asked him how he liked the region, he expressed the utmost awe, united with the bitterest condemnation of the Europeans, for desecrating by their roads and other works a place so obviously the abode of deutas and spirits. He said, that when they had begun to carry the up-hill road through these primeval forests, they were warned of their impiety by the voices of the gods themselves, in bursts of unearthly music, blasts of the trumpet, and the clash of cymbals and gongs.

'The first tree we struck with the axe,' added he with a shudder, 'ran milk; and the second, blood!' Of these two substances, the former is still more ominous in the Brahminical faith than the latter, for everything connected with the cow is sacred and mysterious.

'Well,' said the inquirer, 'what happened—since in spite of these omens you persisted in your task? Did the gods take vengeance?'

'Yes,' said he solemnly; 'but we were only instruments, like the axes in our hands; and the vengeance, therefore, fell upon the prime mover. The governor'—coming close up to the lady, and putting his mouth to her ear—'the governor died!' Now, all this was true—music, milk, blood, and death; and yet none of these was more the work of supernatural agency than any of the common circumstances of life.

The supposed unearthly sounds proceed neither from birds nor men, and the effect is either pleasing or awful, according to the mood of the listener. Some, in such circumstances, instead of receiving impressions of awe, like the Hindoo convict, would exclaim:

And again:

One would think Shakspeare had actually been in some tropical forest when the daylight began to fade, and the myriads of insects to take up their evening-song! One of these extraordinary musicians is distinguished as the trumpeter; another produces a tinkle like a bell; and a third gives forth a sound which the imagination may ascribe to any instrument, or band of instruments, it pleases. This species of cricket buries himself in a centre, to which converge seven holes, which he has drilled in a circle; and from these seven tubes a sound rushes forth, which almost stuns the passer-by. It may be conceived, therefore, that a forest peopled with myriads upon myriads of such 'executants,' must have a strain for every ear, every mood, and every conscience.

The tree which welled forth milk when struck by the axe was the Ficus elastica—a sort of gigantic vine, as thick as a man's arm, which creeps along the ground, sending forth new roots from the joint, and, climbing at length some lofty tree, expands in branches. This is the chief caoutchouc-plant, and its sap has not only the colour, but many of the chemical properties of animal milk, and is frequently drunk as food. The blood came from one of the eucalypta, popularly called the blue gum-tree. The governor did die soon after his arrival on the island, and no doubt immediately after he had disturbed, in the manner related, the genius loci.

Pinang contains about 160 square miles of surface, nearly the whole of which is laid out in hills and dales, the loftiest of the former reaching a height of 2500 feet above the sea-level. On the slopes of this hill are built the governor's rural residence, and a bungalow, where invalids resort for country air. It is possible that great changes may have taken place here of late years, when efforts have been made to dot the island with sugar-plantations; but at the time we speak of, this was a solitary spot, behind which dark forests stretched upwards to the summit. Among these forests, on the shoulder of the hill, there occurs an optical phenomenon, not unknown in Europe, which is here an object of superstitious terror to the natives.

The first European who observed it was a gentleman who, taking advantage of the coolness of the hour, had strolled away in the early morning from the inhabited district, and was skirting round a deep valley, dotted at the bottom, and overhung at the sides with lofty trees. The beams of the sun had already begun to acquire some power, although his disk was scarcely yet above the horizon; and the traveller watched with interest the effect of the dawning light upon a sea of vapour which nearly filled the valley. This slowly-moving cloud, as it was acted upon by the sun, swelled higher and higher, and became whiter and whiter, till it finally settled, filling the whole valley with a substance that looked like alabaster, in the midst of which the topmost branches of the tall trees hung motionless. The scene was strangely beautiful; and the spectator, who was screened from the now risen sun by a belt of forest, lingered for awhile to contemplate it. When at length he resumed his walk, and, emerging from the trees, found himself in the full blaze of the rising sun, he turned once more to observe the effect on the vapour; and a cry of wonder which arose to his lips was only repressed by a feeling of awe, as he saw upon that alabaster surface a dark human figure of gigantic dimensions, surrounded by a halo that seemed formed of the rainbow. A confused rush of associations half acquainted him at the moment with the nature of the phenomenon; but giving way to the feeling of poetical delight, he clasped his hands above his head in admiration—a movement which the Phantom of the Alabaster Valley instantaneously imitated! It was indeed his own shadow—and a shadow he was not to recall, even when he turned away to journey homewards. There, in that lonely place, it seemed to him to remain for ever—a link connecting him with the spirit of nature, and ever and anon drawing him back into her domain from the meanness, and folly, and wickedness of the world.