The place mortified and the poor lady died.  To return to Montezuma.  An honest labourer was brought before him, who made this very tough statement.  He had been carried by an eagle into a cave, where he saw a man in splendid dress sleeping heavily.  Beside him stood a burning stick of incense such as the Aztecs used.  A voice announced that this sleeper was Montezuma, prophesied his doom, and bade the labourer burn the slumberer’s face with the flaming incense stick.  The labourer reluctantly applied the flame to the royal nose, ‘but he moved not, nor showed any feeling’.  On this anecdote being related to Montezuma, he looked on his own face in a mirror, and ’found that he was burned, the which he had not felt till then’. {52}

On the Coppermine River the medicine-man, according to Hearne, prophesies of travellers, like the Highland second-sighted man, ere they appear.  The Finns and Lapps boast of similar powers.  Scheffer is copious on the clairvoyant feats of Lapps in trance.  The Eskimo Angakut, when bound with their heads between their legs, cause luminous apparitions, just as was done by Mr. Stainton Moses, and by the mediums known to Porphyry and Iamblichus; the Angakut also send their souls on voyages, and behold distant lands.  One of the oddest Angekok stories in Rink’s Tales and Traditions of the Eskimo (p. 324) tells how some children played at magic, making ’a dark cabinet,’ by hanging jackets over the door, to exclude the light.  ‘The slabs of the floor were lifted and rushed after them:’  a case of ‘movement of objects without physical contact’.  This phenomenon in future attended the young medium’s possessions, even when he was away from home.  This particular kind of manifestation, so very common in trials for witchcraft, and in modern spiritualistic literature, does not appear to prevail much among savages.  Persons otherwise credible and sane tell the authorities of the Psychical Society that, with only three amateurs present, things are thrown about, and objects are brought from places many miles distant, and tossed on the table.  These are technically termed apports.  The writer knows a case in which this was attested by a witness of the most unimpeachable character.  But savages hardly go so far.  Bishop Callaway has an instance in which ‘spirits’ tossed objects into the midst of a Zulu circle, but such things are not usual.  Savages also set out food for the dead, but they scarcely attain to the credulity, or are granted the experience, of a writer in the Medium. {53} This astonishing person knew a familiar spirit.  At dinner, one day, an empty chair began to move, ’and in answer to the question whether it would have some dinner, said “Yes"’.  It chose croquets de pomme de terre, which were placed on the chair in a spoon, lest the spirit, whose manners were rustic, should break a plate.  ’In a few seconds I was told that it was eaten, and looking, found the half of it gone, with the marks showing the teeth.’  Perhaps few savages would have told such a tale to a journal which ought to have a large circulation—­among believers.