Colonel Barnard, at one time Chief of Police in Calcutta, told me a
most curious story. We have all heard of the Indian "rope-trick," but
none of us have met a person who actually saw it with his own eyes:
the story never reaches us at first-hand, but always at second- or
third-hand, exactly like the accounts one heard from credulous people
in 1914 of the passage of the 75,000 Russian soldiers through England.
No one had actually seen them, but every one knew somebody else whose
wife's cousin had actually conversed with these mysterious Muscovites,
or had seen trains with closely veiled windows rushing at dead of
night towards London, crammed to overflowing with Russian warriors.

In the same way Colonel Barnard had never met an eye-witness of the
rope-trick, but his policemen had received orders to report to him the
arrival in Calcutta of any juggler professing to do it. At length one
of the police informed him that a man able to perform the trick had
reached Calcutta. He would show it on one condition: that Colonel
Barnard should be accompanied by one friend only. The Colonel took
with him one of his English subordinates; he also took with him his
Kodak, into which he had inserted a new roll of films. They arrived at
a poor house in the native quarter, where they were ushered into a
small courtyard thick with the dense smoke arising from two braziers
burning mysterious compounds. The juggler, naked except for his
loin-cloth, appeared and commenced salaaming profoundly, continuing
his exaggerated salaams for some little while. Eventually he produced
a long coil of rope. To Colonel Barnard's inexpressible surprise, the
rope began paying away, as sailors would say, out of the juggler's
hand of its own accord, and went straight up into the air. Colonel
Barnard kodaked it. It went up and up, till their eyes could no longer
follow it. Colonel Barnard kodaked it again. Then a small boy,