"Where's the comfort," said Heywood, gloomily, "of knowing somebody's
worse off?--No, I wasn't thinking of Wutzler, then. Talk of germs! why,
over there, it's goblins they're scaring away. Think, behind their nets
and thorns, what wretches--women, too, and kids--may be crouched down,
quaking, sick with terror. Humph!--I don't mind saying"--for a moment
his hand lay on Rudolph's shoulder--"that I loathe giving this muck-hole
the satisfaction--I'd hate to go Out here, that's all."



CHAPTER VI


THE PAGODA

He was spared that inconvenience. The untimely rain and cold, some
persons said, the few days of untimely heat following, had drowned or
dried, frozen or burnt out, the seeds of peril. But accounts varied,
reasons were plentiful. Soldiers had come down from the chow city,
two-score _li_ inland, and charging through the streets, hacking and
slashing the infested air, had driven the goblins over the walls, with a
great shout of victory. A priest had freighted a kite with all the evil,
then cut it adrift in the sky. A mob had dethroned the God of Sickness,
and banished his effigy in a paper junk, launched on the river at night,
in flame. A geomancer proclaimed that a bamboo grove behind the town
formed an angle most correct, germane, and pleasant to the Azure Dragon
and the White Tiger, whose occult currents, male and female, run
throughout Nature. For any or all of these reasons, the town was
delivered. The pestilence vanished, as though it had come but to grant