ng as I was coming through the thousands of little conical
mounds, with here and there an unburied coffin.

"The dogs are having a baby feast to-night," said an old missionary.

"Why?"

"To appease the devils."

"My God man; you don't mean that they let the dogs eat their babies
because they are afraid of the devil?" I cried.

"I mean just that," replied the missionary.

"Fear! Fear! Fear! Everywhere. Fear by night and fear by day. They never
escape it. It is fear that makes them worship their ancestors. It is
fear that makes them worship idols. It is fear that makes them kill
their girl babies. It is fear that makes them build their little narrow
winding streets, which after a while must become so filthy; fear that if
they do not, the devils will find them; and if they do build their
streets narrow and winding the devils will get lost searching for them.
Oh, God, fear, fear, everywhere! The Orient is full of a terrible and a
constant fear!"

I looked at my friend astonished. He seldom went into such emotional
outbursts. He was judicial, calm, poised; some said, cold. But this
constant sense of fear that was upon the people had finally broken down
his reserve of poise.

"The chimneys are beautiful. See that beautiful upward dip in the
architecture. They are like the roofs," I said.

"But that beautiful, symmetrical development did not come out of a sense
of beauty. It came to fool the devils just as we have said of the roofs.
The devils will glide off into space and will never be able to get down
the chimneys." It is so in other Oriental countries.

* * * * *

The same is true in the Philippine Islands. The whole fabric of human
life is permeated with the black thread of fear.

It is true of China and Korea; it is true of Borneo to a marked degree;
and it is true of that great mass of conglomerate humanity that we think
of as India.

These and other flash-lights of fear remain, and shall remain forever in
my mind. But of a fifty thousand mile trip among hundreds of millions of
human beings; pictures of fear stand out, blurred here and there; but
clear enough in outline so that I can still see the human faces against
a background of midnight darkness.

Three pictures are clearer than the others. Perhaps it was because the
flash that focused them on the plate of my mind was stronger. Perhaps it
was, that the plate of my soul was more sensitive the days these
impressions wer