he palm of horror. But
there were others which equalled them in absurdity, although their most
ludicrous portions affected the populace only as a powerful realization
of the vague and awful. One of these had the following stanzas:

"The dragon's tail shall be the whip
Of scorpions foretold,
With which to lash them thigh and hip
That wander from the fold.
And when their wool is burnt away--
Their garments gay, I mean--
Then this same whip they'll feel, I say,
Upon their naked skin."

The probability seems to be that, besides collecting from all sources
known to him, the pedler had hired an able artist for the production of
original poems of commination. His scheme succeeded; for great was the
sale of these hymns and ballads at a halfpenny a piece in the streets
of Glamerton. Even those who bought to laugh, could not help feeling an
occasional anticipatory sting of which, being sermon-seared, they were
never conscious under pulpit denunciation.

The pedler having emptied his wallet--not like that of Chaucer's
Pardoner,

"Bretful of pardon brought from Rome all hot,"

but crammed with damnation brought all hot from a different
place--vanished; and another wonder appeared in the streets of
Glamerton--a man who cried with a loud voice, borrowing the cry of the
ill-tempered prophet: "Yet forty days, and Glamerton shall be
destroyed."

This cry he repeated at awful intervals of about a minute, walking
slowly through every street, lane, and close of the town. The children
followed him in staring silence; the women gazed from their doors in
awe as he passed. The insanity which gleamed in his eyes, and his pale
long-drawn countenance, heightened the effect of the terrible
prediction. His belief took theirs by storm.

The men smiled to each other, but could not keep it up in the presence
of their wives and sisters. They said truly that he was only a madman.
But as prophets have always been taken for madmen, so madmen often pass
for prophets; and even Stumpin' Steenie, the town-constable, had too
much respect either to his prophetic claims, or his lunacy, perhaps
both, to take him into custody. So through the streets of Glamerton he
went on his bare feet, with tattered garments, proclaiming aloud the
coming destruction, He walked in the middle of the street, and turned
aside for nothing. The coachman of the Royal Mail had to pull up his
four greys on their haunches to keep them off the defiant prop