13. Swindling practices.
These people also deal in ornaments of base metal and practise other swindles. One of their tricks is to drop a ring or ornament of counterfeit gold on the road. Then they watch until a stranger picks it up and one of them goes up to him and says, “I saw you pick up that gold ring, it belongs to so-and-so, but if you will make it worth my while I will say nothing about it.” The finder is thus often deluded into giving him some hush-money and the Jogis decamp with this, having incurred no risk in connection with the spurious metal. They also pretend to be able to convert silver and other metals into gold. They ingratiate themselves with the women, sometimes of a number of households in one village or town, giving at first small quantities of gold in exchange for silver, and binding them to secrecy. Then each is told to give them all the ornaments which she desires to be converted on the same night, and having collected as much as possible from their dupes the Jogis make off before morning. A very favourite device some years back was to personate some missing member of a family who had gone on a pilgrimage. Up to within a comparatively recent period a large proportion of the pilgrims who set out annually from all over India to visit the famous shrines at Benāres, Jagannāth and other places perished by the way from privation or disease, or were robbed and murdered, and never heard of again by their families. Many households in every town and village were thus in the position of having an absent member of whose fate they were uncertain. Taking advantage of this, and having obtained all the information he could pick up among the neighbours, the Jogi would suddenly appear in the character of the returned wanderer, and was often successful in keeping up the imposture for years.[16]