innocent presence of the unborn. He dispatched a servant into the bazar,
to procure frankincense and other things which he directed; and on their
being produced we all retired into a room, and closed the doors and
windows. An earthen pot was placed in the middle of the floor,
containing fire, and the magician sat down by it. He placed the little
boy before him, and poured ink into the hollow of the boy's hand, and
bid him look into it steadily. I think the mother rather quailed, at
seeing her child in such propinquity with "the Enemy;" but recovered
herself on being exhorted to defy the devil and all his works. And the
thing was not entirely without danger from another quarter; for it was
understood the Pasha had directed a special edict against all dealing
with familiar spirits; and the Pasha's edicts were not altogether to be
trifled with, as we knew from the mishap of a poor Indian servant, who
was caught in the bazar in the fact of taking thirteen of the Pasha's
tin piasters in change for a dollar, when the political economy of Cairo
had decreed that twelve were to be equal in public estimation, and was
immediately incarcerated in the place of skulls, or at least of heads,
from which it is supposed he would have come out shorn of his beard and
the chin it grew from, if the Consular cocked hat and Abyssinian charger
had not proceeded at a gallop to the Court at Shubra, to claim him as a
subject of the British crown; and much did poor Baloo vow, that no
earthly temptation should take him again to quit the gentle rule of the
old Lady in Leadenhall-street, who, though she pinches a Peishwa and
mercilessly screws a renter when it suits her, it must be allowed has a
reverent care for the heads of all her lieges, and gives them a fair
chance of going to their graves with the members nature had bestowed on
them.

_Hisce positis_, as the logicians say, the magician began his process.
The boy was innocent of fear; being in fact a person rather perplexed