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Having been driven from my bed at night by the vermin, I saw two sentinels, fully armed, keeping guard towards the mountain, each of them beside a large fire; every two minutes they rang a bell which was hung between two pillars, and were regularly answered by the howling of the little wolf I have before spoken of, as often lurking in the vicinity of the missions.
To the dignity of killing one's fellow-men is added the satisfaction of ridding oneself of vermin. It becomes a matter of sanitation and self-respect. And this, indirectly, recalls to me, that report declares my wife to be with you at Naples. Mon cher je vous en fais câdeau. With you, at least, I know that my honour is safe.
Their pertinacity exceeded the bounds of civility, as I thought; but I was not in a good humour, for the fleas, bugs, and other vermin, which infested our miserable lodgings, had caused me a sleepless night, by goring my body until the blood oozed from the skin in countless places.
Two reasons, at least, may be assigned for it, both of them, however, somewhat hypothetical, it must be owned. 1. Their admiration of youth the same principle which induces some civilized people to powder their heads, and dye their whiskers, &c. when assuming the silvery hue of age! And, 2. Their having learned by experience that it rendered them more obnoxious to vermin and filth.
"In no wise, O King; but when a man is engaged in measuring the infinite and calculating eternity and in spelling out the incomprehensible, it may happen that he does not at once recall the odd word which rules reptiles, makes them live or destroys them. Watch! all this vermin is about to vanish."
We wish to know if any thing is going to depend upon his single will in the matter, we must know, which of these two natures is SOVEREIGN in himself, which good he supremely affects, that of his senses, passions, and private affections, that good which ends in his private and particular nature, a good which has its due place in this system, and is not unnaturally mortified and depressed, as it is in less scientific ones, or that good of the whole, which is each man's highest good; whether he is, in fact, a man, or whether, in the absence of that perfection of the human form, which should be the end of science and government, he approximates at all, or undertakes to approximate at all, to the true human type; whether he be, indeed, a man, in the higher sense of that word, or whether he ranks in the scale of nature, as 'only a nobler kind of vermin, a man, a noble man, a man with a divine ideal and ambition, degenerate into that.
Vermin infest their youth, and fortunes must be spent for curative powders. In later life I have seen how a literature has been built up on the subject of fortunes to be made out of the raising of chickens. It is intended to be read by the gods who have just eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
The scrannel pipes of those who have worn themselves out by their moral fastings, till they have become flat and pale like starved vermin infesting a long-deserted bed, will never reach my ear. I would conceal nothing, because that would be cowardly. But if I cannot bring myself to conceal when concealment is needful, that also is cowardly. Because you have your greed, you build your walls.
The few particulars which I have been able to collect of these people I shall briefly state: They live in miserable small huts; their sole dress consists of a slight wrapper round their waists, sometimes made of bark, at others from skins of animals, or perhaps of blue or white cloth; they eat rice or roots, and indeed any description of food, whether beast, reptile, or vermin: they are extremely filthy; this and bad food give them a cutaneous disorder, with which they are very generally afflicted.
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