looking dreadfully limp and utterly washed out. Hearing of her illness
old Bootha came up. I thought it might amuse Adelaide to see an old
witch; she agreed, so I brought her in.

Bootha went straight up to the sick girl, expressed a few sympathetic
sentences, then she said she would ask the spirits what had made
Adelaide ill and what would cure her.

She moved my furniture until she left the centre of the room clear; she
squatted down, and hanging her head began muttering in an
unintelligible dialect. Presently her voice ceased and we heard from
beside her a most peculiar whistling sort of voice, to which she
responded, evidently interrogating. Again the whistling voice from
further away. Bootha then told me she had asked a dead black fellow,
Big Joe, to tell her what she wanted to know; but he could not, so now
she was going to ask her dead granddaughter. Again she said a sort of
incantation, and again, after a while, came the whistling voice
reply--this time from another direction, not quite so loud. The same
sort of thing was gone through with the same result.

Then Bootha said she would ask Guadgee, a black girl who had been one
of my first favourites in the camp, and who had died a few years
previously.

The whistling voice came from a third direction, though all the time I
could see Bootha's lips moving.

Guadgee answered all she was asked. She said Adelaide was made ill
because she had offended the spirits by bathing in the creek under the
shade of a Minggah, or spirit-tree, a place tabooed to all but