the second, lured away by bribery. Now this clearly points to your patient's having a dangerous and powerful enemy, and you point it out to him and advise him to have a fresh and more powerful charm—necessarily more expensive—with as little delay as possible. He grumbles, but, realising the danger, pays up, and you make him another. The old one can be thrown away, like an empty pill-box.
The other part of your practice—the clinical—consists in combating those witches who are always up to something—sucking blood of young children, putting fearful wild fowl into people to eat up their most valued viscera, or stealing souls o' nights, blighting crops, &c.
Therefore you see the witch doctor's life is not an idle one; he has not merely to humbug the public and pocket the fees—or I should say "bag," pockets being rare in this region—but he works very hard, and has his anxieties just like a white medical man. The souls that get away from him are a great worry. The death of every patient is a danger to a certain extent, because the patient's soul will be vicious to him until it is buried. But I must say I profoundly admire our West African witch doctors for their theory of sisas as an explanation of their not always being able to insert a new soul into a patient, for by this theory they save themselves somewhat, and do not entail on themselves the treatment their brother medicos have to go through on the Nass River in British Columbia. According to Mr. Fraser, in that benighted Nass River district those native American doctors hold it possible that a doctor may swallow a patient's soul by mistake. This is their theory to account for the strange phenomenon of a patient getting worse instead of better when a doctor has been called in, and so the unfortunate doctor who has had this accident
