was so intense that the men who raked and levelled it with long poles could not stand it for more than a minute at a time.  A few yards from the end of the trench a large hole had been dug and filled with water.  When all was ready, six men, ordinary coolies, dressed only in their “dholis,” or loin-cloths, stepped out of the crowd, and, amidst tremendous excitement and a horrible noise of conches and drums, passed over the burning trench from end to end, in single file, at a quick walk, plunging one after the other into the water.  Not one of them showed the least sign of injury.  They had undergone some course of preparation by their priest, not a Brahman, but some kind of devil-doctor or medicine-man, and, as I understood it, they took on themselves and expiated the sins of the Kling community for the past year (a big job, if thieving and lying count; probably not).  They are not, however, always so lucky, for I heard that on the next occasion one of the men fell and was terribly burnt, thus destroying the whole effect of the ceremony.  I do not think this to be any part of the Brahmanical religion, though the ordeal by fire as a test of guilt is, or was, in use all over India.  The fact is that the races of Southern India, where the Aryan element is very small, have kept all their savage customs and devil-worship under the form of Brahmanism.

’Another curious feat I saw performed at Labuan Deli, in Sumatra, on the Chinese New Year.  A Chinaman of the coolie class was squatted stark naked on the roadside, holding on his knees a brass pan the size of a wash-hand basin, piled a foot high with red-hot charcoal.  The heat reached one’s face at two yards, but if it had been a tray of ices the man couldn’t have been more unconcerned.  There was a crowd of Chinese round him, all eagerly asking questions, and a pile of coppers accumulating beside him.  A Chinese shopkeeper told me that the man “told fortunes,” but from the circumstance of a gambling-house being close by, I concluded that his customers were getting tips on a system.

’Hoping these notes may be of service to you,
’I remain,
’Yours truly,
‘STEPHEN PONDER.’

* * * * *

In this rite the fire-pit is thrice as long (at a rough estimate) as that of the Fijians.  The fire is of wooden embers, not heated stones.  As in Fiji, a man who falls is burned, clearly suggesting that the feet and legs, but not the whole body, are in some way prepared to resist the fire.  As we shall find to be the practice in Bulgaria, the celebrants place their feet afterwards in water.  As in Bulgaria, drums are beaten to stimulate the fire-walkers.  Neither here nor in Fiji are the performers said to be entranced, like the Bulgarian Nistinares. {161} On the whole, the Kling rite (which the Klings, I am informed, also practise in the islands whither they are carried as coolies) so closely resembles the Fijian and the Tongan that one would explain the