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Updated: May 21, 2025
"For as he thinketh in his heart," said Solomon, "so is he." It is a saying, obviously, that one may easily fill with fantastic meanings, as the prevailing gabble of the mental healers, New Thoughters, efficiency engineers, professors of scientific salesmanship and other such mountebanks demonstrates, but nevertheless it is one grounded, at bottom, upon an indubitable fact.
The streets of Kioto were thronged with mountebanks, peep-shows, performing acrobats, and conjurers. Sleek and pampered priests in yellow robes were met at every turn, a class who exercise a certain influence over the people through their superstition, but who command no personal respect.
The 29th of May was devoted to popular festivities. All the afternoon the public gardens were crowded with musicians, singers, mountebanks, and pedlars. In the evening the via della Riconoscenza, as far as the East Gate, was lit by lampstands, and at the end of a long row there was an eagle of fire holding on his breast an iron crown. Nothing was neglected to touch the national pride of Italy.
They soon subside into languid, sensuous creatures. As we sat shaded by the broad piazza in the midday, the native jugglers and snake-charmers would come, and, squatting in the blazing sun, beg us to give heed to their tricks. They are singularly clever, these Indian mountebanks, especially in sleight of hand tricks.
As for the professional Pan-Islamic propagandists, more particularly those of the religious fraternities, they swarm everywhere, rousing the fanaticism of the people: "Travelling under a thousand disguises as merchants, preachers, students, doctors, workmen, beggars, fakirs, mountebanks, pretended fools or rhapsodists, these emissaries are everywhere well received by the Faithful and are efficaciously protected against the suspicious investigations of the European colonial authorities."
The Fehemi, or Helebi women, are noted for their chastity; the Rhagarin are not. The men of the Rhagarin are tinkers and blacksmiths, and sell cheap jewellery or instruments of iron and brass. Many of them are athletes, mountebanks, and monkey-exhibitors; the women are rope-dancers and musicians.
Again there were, besides, all sorts of oddities, mountebanks who hung by their heels, clowns and goblins on the tops of the fences, dwarfs with big sacks on their backs; an old hat or a nightcap: an animal without a head, another with a neck of preposterous length, an enormous mitten, an overturned water-can.
There were many bottles in the cart which were warranted to cure the ailment, and the famous Morpurgo seemed to be a very sensible man, no buffoon like the other mountebanks. The wife of the baker, Wilhelm Peterssohn, who stood beside him, a woman he knew well, said to her companion that the doctor's remedies were good, they had quickly cured her godmother of a bad attack of erysipelas.
It would have been a fine scene, that execution, could it but have taken place in the midst of the mad mountebanks and tipsy strumpets who had flocked so far to witness it, wishing to wind up the delights of their carnival by a bonnebouche of a murder. The other attempt was equally unfortunate.
We see the Indians fling the pinon nuts into the cinders, and then draw them forth again, parched and smoking. We see them light their claystone pipes, and send forth clouds of blue vapour. We see them gesticulate as they relate their red adventures to one another. We hear them shout, and chatter, and laugh like mountebanks. How unlike the forest Indian!
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