ith the wool
outward; a great Tartar bonnet on the head, with two horns growing
through it: it was about eight feet high, yet had no feet or legs, or
any other proportion of parts.

This scarecrow was set up at the outside of the village; and when I came
near to it, there were sixteen or seventeen creatures, whether men or
women I could not tell, for they make no distinction by their habits,
either of body or head; these lay all flat on the ground, round this
formidable block of shapeless wood. I saw no motion among them any more
than if they had been logs of wood, like their idol; at first I really
thought they had been so; but when I came a little nearer, they started
up upon their feet, and raised a howling cry, as if it had been so many
deep-mouthed hounds, and walked away as if they were displeased at our
disturbing them. A little way off from this monster, and at the door of
a tent or hut, made all of sheep-skins and cow-skins, dried, stood three
butchers: I thought they were such; for when I came nearer to them, I
found they had long knives in their hands, and in the middle of the tent
appeared three sheep killed, and one young bullock, or steer. These, it
seems, were sacrifices to that senseless log of an idol; and these three
men priests belonging to it; and the seventeen prostrated wretches were
the people who brought the offering, and were making their prayers to
that stock.

I confess I was more moved at their stupidity, and this brutish worship
of a hobgoblin, than ever I was at any thing in my life: to see God's
most glorious and best creature, to whom be had granted so many
advantages, even by creation, above the rest of the works of his hands,
vested with a reasonable soul, and that soul adorned with faculties and
capacities adapted both to honour his Maker and be honoured by him; I
say, to see it sunk and degenerated to a degree so more than stupid, as
to prostrate itself to a frightful nothing, a mere imaginary object
dressed up by themselves, and made terrible to themselves by their own
contrivance, adorned only with clouts and rags; and that this should be
the effect of mere ignorance, wrought up into hellish devotion by the
devil himself; who, envying his Maker the homage and adoration of his
creatures, had deluded them into such gross, surfeiting, sordid, and
brutish things, as one would think should shock nature itself.

But what signified all the astonishment and reflection of thoughts? Thus
i