AN UNHOLY VISITATION.

King Country Chronicle, Volume V, Issue 312, 16 November 1910, Page 3

AN UNHOLY VISITATION.

An Armenian missionary, whose tale is recorded in "Harper s Magazine," gives an interesting account of how an outbreak of cholera was combated in one mountain village. The source of the trouble was the failure of the people to observe the most elementary laws of sanitation. Their water supply was drawn from an open ditch which ran through the streets and collected all sorts of impurities, and the housewives would neither boil it nor filter it. Advice and rsmonstraces were alike useless, and in despair the medical authorities who had undertaken to combat the disease asked the village priest to explain to his congregation the nature of cholera. He replied that the women who prepared the food were too ignorant to comprehend the difference between a germ and a mountain lion, but he gathered his flock into the church and appeared before them in his flowing clerical robes. He reminded the people, in majestic tones, that he had warned them of the punishments that would fall upon them unless they repented and were more zealous in their religious duties. His words had been fulfilled because God had permitted the water to swarm with little snakes, so that people who drank it would perish. "Whence came these snakes?" he asked. "Verily I say unto you that they are nought but devils that God has unloosed from hell to chasten you sinners. Disguised as little snakes, they havs fled to the water to cool off. Woe unto them that drink the cup of Satan, or cook in unhallowed water, for them the devils will surely seize and destroy. There is only one way of escape; make the water so hot that the imps will be glad to run back to Gehenna, whence they came. When the water boils you may know that every bursting bubble is a devil that leaps from the pot" The sermon was received with moans of repentance and long after the cholera nad disappered the people of the village still used no water that had not been boiled.