Modern Survivals of the Ordeal. his wife, among the evidence which was al lowed to go to the jury was that of a female witness who said : " If my throat was to be cut I could tell, before God Almighty, that the deceased smiled when he (the murderer) touched her. I swore this before the justice and also that she bled considerably. He touched her twice. I also swore before the justice that it was observed by other people in the house." The ordeal of bier-right, as it was called, was employed in New York in 1824, when a suspected murderer named Johnson was led from his cell to the hospital where lay the body of his victim, which he was required to touch. The man's dissimulation, which had before remained unshaken, failed him at this test, his overstrung nerves gave way, and he made confession of his crime. The proceedings were sustained by court, and a subsequent attempt at retraction was over ruled. Crossing the Pacific we find picturesque and •peculiar ordeals still more or less employed among the semi-civilized inhabitants of Oce ánica. The Dyaks of Borneo, for example, sometimes try their cases in this manner : The two litigants are handed lumps of salt of equal size, which they must drop simul taneously into a vessel of water, and the one whose lump is soonest dissolved is adjudged the loser. In some cases each takes a liv ing shell-fish, over which they squeeze lemon juice, and the one whose mollusc first re sponds to this gentle stimulant by moving, is declared the winner. In the Philippines these tests are known to have been employed up to a comparatively recent date. A needle was thrust into the scalps of two litigants, and the one from whom the blood flowed most profusely lost the case. Or two chickens were roasted to death and then opened, when the owner of the chicken which was found to have the largest liver was held to be defeated. Swallowing the goo was an ordeal practised not so very long ago in Japan. The "goo"
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was a paper inscribed with certain cabalistic characters; this was swallowed by the ac cused person, and, it was commonly supposed, gave him no rest, if guilty, until he confessed. Among the Indians on the coast of Malabar, a person accused of crime is obliged to swim across a large river abounding with crocodiles, and if he escapes, he is esteemed innocent. The Kalabarese of Africa have a peculiar custom of drawing a white and a black line on the head of a chimpanzee, which is then held up before the accused. If the white line is inclined toward him, he is acquitted; if the black line, he is declared guilty. The ordeal of boiling oil was practised in India as late as 1867, when a camel driver was compelled to thrust his hand in a vessel of boiling oil to extract therefrom a ring, as a test of his innocence or guilt. The man was severely scalded, and the British authorities, hearing of the case, took prompt measures to suppress further trials of this nature. They compelled the accuser to pay the crippled camel driver a pension of one hundred rupees for the rest of his life. Speaking of India, an English tourist de scribes entertainingly how while travelling in that country in 1881, he witnessed a remark able case of trial, or rather purgation, by or deal, and at a place not more than a dozen miles from a city where at the same hour English lawyers were pleading before English judges. It was the ordeal of the Tree of Justice. > It appears that one fine day the tourist, ob serving in the distance a peculiar shaped hill, bare and bald on its crown, set off to mount it. Reaching the top, he carrie to an inclosure built of sunburnt brick, over which pro jected the boughs of a large tamarind tree. Entering by the gate, which stood ajar, he found inside an old man seated beside a tomb. "What place is this? " inquired the tourist. "This is the hill of Saint Pir Knan, sahib. Here' is his tomb and also his tree." "The tree is sacred to him, then?" "When the Pir Sahib had finished his bat
