the sticks which were possessed primarily_, and through them the
men, _who could hardly hold them_. The sticks whirled and dragged the
men round and round like mad, through bush and thorny shrub, and over
every obstacle; nothing stopped them; their bodies were torn and
bleeding. At last they came back to the assembly, whirled round again,
and rushed down the path to fall panting and exhausted in the hut of
one of a chief's wives. The sticks, rolling to her very feet,
denounced her as a thief. She denied it; but the medicine-man
answered, "The spirit has declared her guilty; the spirit never
lies."' The woman, however, was acquitted, after a proxy trial by
ordeal: a cock, used as her proxy, threw up the _muavi_, or
ordeal-poison.

Here the points to be noted are, first, the violent movement of the
sticks, which the men could hardly hold; next, the physical agitation
of the men. The former point is illustrated by the confession of a
civil engineer writing in the _Times_. This gentleman had seen the rod
successfully used for water; he was asked to try it himself, and he
determined that it should not twist in his hands 'if an ocean rolled
under his feet.' Twist it did, however, in spite of all his efforts to
hold it, when he came above a concealed spring. Another example is
quoted in the _Quarterly Review_, vol. xxii. p. 374. A narrator, in
whom the editor 'had implicit confidence,' mentions how, when a lady
held the twig just over a hidden well, 'the twig turned so quick as
to snap, breaking near her fingers.' There seems to be no indiscretion
in saying, as the statement has often been printed before, that the
lady spoken of in the _Quarterly Review_ was Lady Milbanke, mother of
the wife of Byron. Dr. Hutton, the geologist, is quoted as a witness
of her success in the search for water with the divining rod. He says
that, in an experiment at Woolwich, 'the twigs twisted themselves off
below her fingers which were considerably indented by so forcibly
holding the rods between them.'[185] Next, the violent excitement of
the four young men of the Mauganja is paralleled by the physical
experience of the lady quoted in the _Quarterly Review_. 'A degree of
agitation was visible in her face when she first made the experiment;
she says this agitation was great' when she began to practise the art,
or whatever we are to call it. Again, in _Lettres qui decouvrent
l'illusion_ (p. 93), we read that Jacques Aymar (who discovered the
Lyo