the curdled cloud lay low upon the hills, wrapping in its
hot blanket the sweltering breathless town; and rolled off sullenly when
the sun rose high, to let him pour down his glare, and quicken into evil
life all evil things. For Baalzebub is a sunny fiend; and loves not
storm and tempest, thunder, and lashing rains; but the broad bright sun,
and broad blue sky, under which he can take his pastime merrily, and
laugh at all the shame and agony below; and, as he did at his great
banquet in New Orleans once, madden all hearts the more by the contrast
between the pure heaven above and the foul hell below.

And up and down the town the foul fiend sported, now here now there;
snapping daintily at unexpected victims, as if to make confusion worse
confounded: to belie Thurnall's theories and prognostics, and harden the
hearts of fools by fresh excuses for believing that he had nothing to do
with drains and water; that he was "only"--such an only!--"the
Visitation of God."

He has taken old Beer's second son; and now he clutches at the old man
himself; then across the street to Gentleman Jan, his eldest: but he is
driven out from both houses by chloride of lime and peat dust, and the
colony of the Beers has peace awhile.

Alas! there are victims enough and to spare beside them, too ready for
the sacrifice, and up the main street he goes unabashed, springing in at
one door and at another, on either side of the street, but fondest of
the western side, where the hill slopes steeply down to the house-backs.

He fleshes his teeth on every kind of prey. The drunken cobbler dies, of
course: but spotless cleanliness and sobriety does not save the mother
of seven children, who has been soaking her brick floor daily with water
from a poisoned well, defiling where she meant to clean. Youth does not
save the buxom lass, who has been filling herself, as girls will do,
with unripe fruit: nor innocence the two fair children who were sailing
their feather-boats yesterday in the quay-pools, as they have sailed
them for three years past, and found no hurt; piety does not save the
bed-ridden old dame, bed-ridden in the lean-to garret, who moans, "It is
the Lord!" and dies. It is "the Lord" to her, though Baalzebub himself
be the angel of release.

And yet all the while sots and fools escape where wise men fall; weakly
women, living amid all wretchedness, nurse, unharmed, strong men who
have breathed fresh air all day. Of one word of Scripture