advantage of his increased powers for mischief.[612] Thus in the island
of Florida illness is regularly laid at the door of a ghost; the only
question that can arise is which particular ghost is doing the mischief.
Sometimes the patient imagines that he has offended his dead father,
uncle, or brother, who accordingly takes his revenge by stretching him
on a bed of sickness. In that case no special intercessor is required;
the patient himself or one of his kinsfolk will sacrifice and beg the
ghost to take the sickness away; it is purely a family affair. Sometimes
the sick man thinks that it is his own private or tame ghost who is
afflicting him; so he will leave the house in order to escape his
tormentor. But if the cause of sickness remains obscure, a professional
doctor or medicine-man will be consulted. He always knows, or at least
can ascertain, the ghost who is causing all the trouble, and he takes
his measures accordingly. Thus he will bind on the sick man the kind of
leaves that the ghost loves; he will chew ginger and blow it into the
patient's ears and on that part of the skull which is soft in infants;
he will call on the name of the ghost and entreat him to remove the
sickness. Should all these remedies prove vain, the doctor is by no
means at the end of his resources. He may shrewdly suspect that
somebody, who has an ill-will at the patient, has set his private ghost
to maul the sick man and do him a grievous bodily injury. If his
suspicions are confirmed and he discovers the malicious man who is
egging on the mischievous ghost, he will bribe him to call off his
ghost; and if the man refuses, the doctor will hire another ghost to
assault and batter the original assailant. At Wango in San Cristoval
regular battles used to be fought by the invisible champions above the
sickbed of the sufferer, whose life or death depended on the issue of
the combat. Their weapons were spears, and sometimes more than one ghost
would be engaged on either side.[613]

[Sidenote: Diagnosis of ghosts who have caused illness.]

In Ysabel the doctor employs an ingenious apparatus for discovering the
cause of sickness and ascertaining its cure. He suspends a stone at one
end of a string while he holds the other end in his hand. Then he
recites the names of all the people who died lately, and when the stone
swings at anybody's name, he knows that the ghost of that man has caused
the illness. It remains to find out what the ghost will ta