Page:Occult Japan - Lovell.djvu/160

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144
OCCULT JAPAN.

the man himself fell face forward upon the floor.

The assistant advanced, raised the possessed to a sitting posture, and fell to thumping him on the back and chest to wake him. This energetic treatment brought him sufficiently to himself to be able to articulate for water. But when the glass was put to his lips he bit it to pieces in his frenzied efforts to drink. By good luck he neither cut himself nor swallowed any of the pieces.

After his senses had fully returned and his arms had been well kneaded, we carried him out upon the veranda, his legs still rigid in catalepsy. There they had to be violently rubbed and jerked into a natural state again. His pulse had been eighty-four at the time when he began upon his incantation; it was one hundred and twenty as he came to himself again.

When sufficiently recovered he went and bathed, and on returning, his first question was whether he had spoken in the trance. On being told that he had not uttered a syllable, he was much chagrined. He had hoped, he said, to have astounded us by speaking English when possessed, a tongue