at if a person falls into the river that is the River
God pulling him in.

The constant fear of this River God is so deeply intrenched in these
poor souls that they take no pleasure on the water and they carry their
sense of fear to such an extent that they will not even attempt a rescue
of their own babies or loved ones if these happen to fall into the
water.

Mr. Hutchinson calls attention to Dr. E. D. Soper's book "The Faiths of
Mankind" in which there is an entire chapter called "Where Fear Holds
Sway."

"Where is it that fear holds sway?" the reader asks.

The answer is, "In the Orient"!

Yes, the whole Orient is one great gallery of dim, uncertain, weird,
mysterious Flash-lights of Fear.

Paul Hutchinson says:

"It is impossible for the Westerner to conceive such an
atmosphere until he has lived in it. In fact he may live in it
for years and never realize the hold which it has upon his
native neighbors. But it is no exaggeration to say that, to the
average Chinese, the air is peopled with countless spirits,
most of them malignant, all attempting to do him harm. Even a
catalogue of the devils, such as have been named by the
scholarly Jesuit, Father Dore, is too long for the limits of
this article. But there they are, millions of them. They hover
around every motion of every waking hour, and they enter the
sanctity of sleep. An intricate system of circumnavigating
them, that makes the streets twist in a fashion to daze
Boston's legendary cow and puts walls in front of doors to
belie the hospitality within, runs through the social order."

This fear is even expressed in Chinese architecture.

"Why is that strange wall built in front of every household door and
even before the Temples?" I asked a friend in China.

"It is put there to fool the devils. They will see that wall and think
that there is no door and then will go away and not bother that house
any more," I was told.

The very architecture of the Chinese home is to keep the devils out. The
strange curves with the graceful upward sweep that makes the roofs so
beautiful to American eyes is for the purpose of throwing devils of the
air off the track. They will come down from the skies and start down the
curve of the roofs but will be turned back into the skies again by the
upward slant of the twisted roofs.

It was this same terrible sense of fear which developed the old surgical
system that