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Oldeschole found that he could not stand at all before this young Hercules, seeing that his special stall was considered to be the foulest in the whole range of the Augean stables. He soon saw that the river was to be turned in on him, and that he was to be officially obliterated in the flood.
"Why, somebody ought to do for the poor, and I should like to do it." And so Hercules cleaned the Augean stables. And so my humble, homely Hoosier story of twenty years ago draws to a close, and not without regret I take leave of Ralph and Hannah; and Shocky, and Bud, and Martha, and Miss Nancy, and of my readers.
He had, of course, not accomplished the whole Augean task of purification. He was a vigorous Huguenot, but no Hercules, and demigods might have shrunk appalled at the filthy mass of corruption which great European kingdoms everywhere presented to the reformer's eye. Compared to the Spanish Government, that of France might almost have been considered virtuous, yet even there everything was venal.
The Pasha shouted the last word, and then fell back in fits of laughter; while the terrified man fled to the hen-house, and drove its occupants frantic in his wild attempts to cleanse their Augean stable. It was not until midnight that Sanda Pasha and Lancey, taking leave of Hamed and his guests, returned home. "Come, follow me," said the Pasha, on entering the palace.
To Major Sleeman was given the general superintendence of the giant task of ridding India of Thuggee, and he and his seventeen assistants accomplished it. It was the Augean Stables over again.
Fastidious people who did not read it gave it a bad name, not recognizing the classic and heroic attitude of those engaged in pitchforking up and turning over the muck of the Augean stables under the pretense of cleaning them. Mr. Brad had a Socratic contempt for this sort of fault-finding. It was answer enough to say, "It pays. The people like it or they wouldn't buy it.
To Major Sleeman was given the general superintendence of the giant task of ridding India of Thuggee, and he and his seventeen assistants accomplished it. It was the Augean Stables over again.
He had to play a substitute for Walton, who was rather too battered to be of any real use in the scrum; but, with that exception, the team that entered the field was the same that should have entered it the day before. But his labours in the Augean stables of Kay's were by no means over. Practically they had only begun. The state of the house now was exactly what it had been under Fenn.
No one seemed to take the trouble to cleanse this Augean stable, this Pandemonium, this tangle of crime, filth, and pestilence in the centre of the second city of the kingdom. An extended examination of the lowest districts of other cities never revealed anything half so bad, either in intensity of moral and physical infection, nor in comparative density of population.
Tangier is beastly but not bad for work.... It is a place of absolute rascality, and large fortunes are made by selling European protections a regular Augean stable." Mrs. Burton and Lisa left England at the end of January, and Burton met them at Gibraltar. K.C.M.G., 5th February 1886. When the first volume of The Arabian Nights appeared Burton was sixty-four.
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