A mob had dethroned the God of Sickness, and banished his effigy in a paper junk, launched on the river at night, in flame.

A geomancer proclaimed that a bamboo grove behind the town formed an angle most correct, germane, and pleasant to the Azure Dragon and the White Tiger, whose occult currents, male and female, run throughout Nature.

For any or all of these reasons, the town was delivered.

The pestilence vanished, as though it had come but to grant Monsieur Jolivet his silence, and to add a few score uncounted living wretches to the dark, mighty, imponderable host of ancestors.
The relief, after dragging days of uncertainty, came to Rudolph like a sea-breeze to a stoker.

To escape and survive,--the bare experience seemed to him at first an act of merit, the deed of a veteran.