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or rest — house, in which the Brother who had been passing through Simla — 

 according to what Madame Blavatsky told us — had spent the previous night. 



We amused ourselves by examining the little building inside and out, 

 „bathing in the good magnetism", as Madame Blavatsky expressedit, and then, 

 lying on the grass outside, it occurred to some one that we wanted more coffee. 

 The servants were told to prepare some, but it appeared that they had used up 

 all our water. The water to be found in the streams near Simla is not of a 

 kind to be used for purposes of this sort, and for a picnic, clean filtered water 

 is always taken out in bottles. It appears that all the bottles in our baskets had 

 been exhausted. This report was promptly verified by the servants by the ex- 

 hibition of the empty bottles. The only thing to be done was to send to a 

 brewery, the nearest building, about a mile off, and ask for water. I wrote a 

 pencil note and a coolie went off with the empty bottles. Time passed, and the 

 coolie returned, to our great disgust, without the water. There had been no 

 European left at the brewery that day (it was Sunday) to receive the note, and 

 the coolie had stupidly plodded back with the empty bottles under his arm, in- 

 stead of asking about and finding some one able to supply the required water. 



At this time our party was a little dispersed. X . . . and one of the other 

 gentlemen had wandered off. No one of the remainder of the party was ex- 

 pecting fresh phenomena, when Madame suddenly got up, went over to the baskets, 

 a dozen or twenty yards off, picked out a bottle — one of those, I believe, which 

 had been brought back by the coolie empty — and came back to us holding it 

 under the fold of her dress. Laughingly producing it, it was found to be füll of 

 water. Just like a conjuring trick, will some one say? Just like, except for the 

 conditions. For such a conjuring trick, the conjuror defines the thing to be done. 

 In our case the want of water was as unforeseeable in the first instance as the 

 want of the cup and saucer. The accident that left the brewery deserted by its 

 Europeans, and the further accident that the coolie sent up for water should have 

 been so abnormally stupid even for a coolie as to come back without, because 

 there happened to be no European to take my note, were accidents but for which 

 the opportunity for obtaining the water by occult agency could not have arisen. 

 And those accidents supervened on the fundamental accident, impropable in itself, 

 that our servants should have sent us out insufficiently supplied. That any bottle 

 of water could have been left unnoticed at the bottom of the baskets is a Suggestion 

 that I can hardly imagine any one present putting forward, for the servants had 

 been found fault with for not bringing enough; they had just before had the 

 baskets completely emptied out, and we had not submitted to the Situation tili 

 we had been fully satisfied that there really was no more water left. Further- 

 more, I tasted the water in the bottle Madame Blavatsky produced, ant it was 

 not water of the same kind as that which came from our own filters. It was an 



