Page:Occult Japan - Lovell.djvu/250

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228
OCCULT JAPAN.

busy. To be so frequently divine has its drawbacks. Except for his succès d'estime, a nakaza must wish at times that he were merely mortal. Even in all the club diseases, to be both doctor and patient, which is what it amounts to, is no slight strain on the poor man's constitution.

The god's conversation, though not superficially brilliant, is tolerably to the point, and certainly suggests intuition at times, though I know no cases of a very startling nature. The best instance I witnessed was the divining by the god of the pain in the leg of a friend of mine, to which, since the man was unknown to him and betrayed the fact by no outward sign, there was no visible clue.

The prophecies are not striking, though quite satisfactory to the club. They are religiously recorded on slips of paper and filed in the club archives. So that one may find there what the club's history was, or should have been, month by month in the past. The prophecies are laconic and indefinite enough to figure in the predictions of the "New England Farmer's Almanac;" a lack of precision which does not detract from their chance of verification.