Rama passes the winnowing-fan, containing the dead woman's
spirit, over the head of the medium. "Let the spirit appear" shrieks Rama
amid the clashing of the cymbals.

"Let the spirit appear" he cries, as he blows a cloud of incense into
Krishna's face. The medium quivers like an aspen leaf; the dead woman's
brothers crawl forward and lay their foreheads upon his feet; he shakes
more violently as the spirit takes firmer hold upon him; and then with a
wild shriek he rolls upon the ground and lies, rent with paroxysms, his
face stretched upwards to the winnowing-fan. Louder and louder crash the
cymbals; louder rises the chant. "Who art thou?" cries Rama. "I am
Chandrabai," comes the answer. "Hast thou any wish unfulfilled?" asks the
midwife. "Nay, all my wishes have been met," cries the spirit through the
lips of the medium, "I am in very truth Chandrabai, who was, but am not
now, of this world." As the last words die away the men dash forward, twist
Krishna's hair into a knot behind, dress him, as he struggles, in the
female attire which the midwife has been guarding, and place in his hand a
wooden slab rudely carved into the semblance of a woman and child. "Away,
away to the underworld" chant the singers; and at the command Krishna
wrenches himself free from the men who are holding him and dashes out with
a yell into the night.

Straight as an arrow he heads for the seashore, his hands clutching the air
convulsively, his 'sari' streaming in the night-breeze; and behind, like
hounds on the trail of the deer, come Rama, the brethren, the sisters, and
rest of the community. Over the shingle they stream and down on to the hard
wet sand. Some one digs a hole; another produces a black cock; and Rama
with a knife cuts its throat over the hole, imploring the spirit's
departure, at the very moment that Krishna with a final shriek plunges into
the sea. They follow him, carry him out of danger, and lay him, stark and
speechless, upon the margin of the waves.

Thence, after a pause and a final prayer, they bear him homeward, as men
bear a corpse, nor leave him until he has regained consciousness and his
very self. For with that last shrill cry the ghost of Chandrabai fled
across the waste waters to meet the pale ancestral dead and dwell with them
for evermore: and the house of Vishnu the fisherman was freed from the
curse of her vagrant and unpropitiated spirit. "She has never troubled me
since that day," says Vishnu; "but at tim