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This affectionate relation between the Southern whites and those blacks who come into close touch with them has not been overdrawn even in fiction. This perplexity of Southern character extends even to the intermixture of the races. That is spoken of as though it were dreaded worse than smallpox, leprosy, or the plague.
After that, I shunned these scoundrels like the leprosy: and the next time I was pertinaciously followed, I stopped, and in a loud voice, pointed out the man to the passers-by; upon which he absconded; rapidly turning up into sight a pair of obliquely worn and battered boot-heels.
Blotched as with leprosy stood the walls, whence many hundreds of blocks had fallen into Broadway forming a vast moraine that for some distance choked that thoroughfare. In numberless places the steel frame peered through. The whole roof had caved in, crushing down the upper stories, of which only a few sparse upstanding metal beams remained.
The stars are only a brilliant leprosy on the face of the heavens.’ ‘For God’s sake,’ I cried, ‘is there, then, no happy place above, where virtue is rewarded after death?’ But he, staring at me with his pale eyes, said, cuttingly, ‘So you want a bonus for having taken care of your sick mother, and refrained from poisoning your worthy brother?’ At these words he looked anxiously round, but appeared immediately set at rest when he observed that it was only Heinrich Beer, who had approached to invite him to a game at whist.”
It is thus also that, though transcending all diseases, the Soul regards himself to be afflicted by headache and opthalmia and toothache and affections of the throat and abdominal dropsy, and burning thirst, and enlargement of glands, and cholera, and vitiligo, and leprosy, and burns, and asthma and phthisis, and epilepsy, and whatever other diseases of diverse kinds are seen in the bodies of embodied creatures.
So many lepers come from the Argan Forest provinces of Haha and Shiadma that leprosy is believed by many Moors to result from the free use of Argan oil. There is no proper foundation for this belief. This is the most important of the five supplications. The Sura of Al Koran called "The Night Journey" says, "To the prayer of daybreak the Angels themselves bear witness."
A third finally condemns the erring Cressid to be stricken with leprosy, and to wander about with cup and clapper, like the unhappy lepers in the great cities of the Middle Ages.
"My son," replied the queen, taking a royal ring of carved agate from her finger, and placing it on a stand before him, for so great was the terror of contagion from those afflicted with leprosy, that even the affectionate mother of Bladud avoided the touch of her child, "this ring was wrought by the master-hand of a Druid, a skillful worker in precious stones, within the sacred circle of Stonehenge.
'Beautiful as the leprosy, dazzling as the lightning, to use a phrase of her enthusiastic admirer Hazlitt, she takes her station like a lady in some portrait by Paris Bordone, with gleaming golden hair twisted into snakelike braids about her temples, with skin white as cream, bright cheeks, dark dauntless eyes, and on her bosom, where it has been chafed by jewelled chains, a flush of rose.
A great many people take refuge in archways when it rains, and run out as soon as it holds up, and a great many people take religion as an umbrella, to put down when the sunshine comes. We cross the bridge and forget it, and when the leprosy is out of us we do not care to go back and give thanks.