to propitiate the gods, to subdue enemies,
and to secure good fortune to individuals, households, and
communities. There are Indian princes who regularly consult their
fortune-tellers regarding public and private affairs.

A curious bathing fair was held at Ajudhia, in Oude, in February 1878.
When a peculiar conjunction of the planets takes place (which occurs
only once in eighty years), the natives rush in crowds to the river,
as they believe that if they manage to bathe and go through certain
ceremonies in four minutes and a half, they will obtain the remission
of their own sins and those of millions of their ancestors. On this
occasion the rush to the river turned out so great that numbers were
trodden under foot, and sixty-five persons lost their lives.

The mysterious lights in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, which are believed
by mariners to be warnings of great tempests and shipwreck, were
unusually brilliant in 1878. It is said to be a fact, established by
the experience of a century, that when these lights blaze brightly in
the summer nights, the phenomena are invariably followed by great
storms. They give the appearance to spectators on the shore of a ship
on fire. The fire itself seems to consist of blue and yellow flames,
now dancing high above the water, and then flickering, paling, and
dying out, only to spring up again with fresh brilliancy. If a boat
approaches, it flits away, moving further out, and is pursued in vain.
The lights are plainly visible from the shore from midnight until two
in the morning. They appear to come from the sea shoreward, and at
dawn retire gradually, and are lost in the morning mist. Paradis, the
French pilot, who took charge of the British Fleet under Admiral Sir
Hovenden Walker when it sailed up the St. Lawrence to seize Quebec in
1711, declared he saw one of these lights before that armada was
shattered by a dreadful gale on the 22d of August. The light, he said,
danced before his vessel all the way up the gulf. Every great wreck
that has taken place there since Sir Hovenden Walker's calamity has
been preceded, if tradition is to be believed, by these mysterious
lights, and they have thus warned the mariner of fatal storms.

In July last (1879) a woman, known as the Queen of Hearts, who had
attained the age of one hundred years, and who had been known for
three quarters of a century as a fortune-teller, died in Vienna.
Apparently gifted with the faculty of prescience, intimatel