"Ignoramus," writing to the Times of Thursday, from Amble- side,
on the Slade case, describes a trick which, when command- ing at the fort of Attock, on the Indus, in 1861, he saw practised by an Indian conjuror. On the mess-table, on which the cloth was still spread, this man placed a rupee at one corner and the narrator's signet-ring at the other. Then he repeated a prayer, played on an instrument, and the ring, "with a vibratory motion, keeping time to the music, moved along the diagonal until it reached the rupee, which it clawed,—I can describe it by no other word,—and brought back to its own corner." The conjuror declined to sell his secret. If the affair happened just as it is told, it is surely as likely that the man was what is now called a ' medium,'—whatever that may be,—as that he had any mechanical secret for making a ring dance and claw,' without any visible link between him and it. His recitation of a prayer might either have been done to impose upon others, or from his own profound belief in the existence of some unrecognised quality in himself. But it is as idle to try to conjecture the explanation of anonymous stories referring to a distant date, as to credit with any unusual power persons who will not give the only sufficient test in their power that they are not mere jugglers.
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