Page:Under the Sun.djvu/280

256. Spiders fare ill with most of us, and no earwig of discernment comes for a holiday among us.

In India, however, everything alike is welcome at the fountain of superstitious tenderness, and where European influences have not penetrated, all creation seems to live in amity. The teaching of the compassionate Buddha, “the speechless world’s interpreter,” has elsewhere won for living things the same forbearance at the hands of other millions, and Asia thus stands apart from Europe as the refuge and asylum of the smaller worlds of creatures, harmful and harmless alike.

This pitifulness works often to strange results. A man-eating tiger establishes his shambles near a village, but the villagers, knowing him to be an old and esteemed acquaintance, lately deceased, steal away from their hamlet and deprecate any violent dislodgment of the human soul from its present tiger body. Monkeys rob the shops in the bazaar, but who could think of reprisals against such holy thieves? Snakes take human life, but pay none in penalty. Elephants and cuckoos, bulls and tortoises, quadruped and bird, fish and reptile, all come in for their special honors and special privileges, and, when danger threatens, for special immunity.

The rats in the Deccan in the same way enjoyed the full benefit of this delightful catholicity of benevolence, not from any virtues inherent in that forward rodent, or any tradition of good done to man in a former state, but simply from the Hindoo’s tolerance of small life, and the contemporary growth of superstition.

The famines that laid waste some of the fairest provinces of India had stolen from every hearth one or more of the family circle, and the peasant mind, loyal to its teachings, refused to believe that the loved ones had