The World's Greatest Books [Volumes 1-15, 17-20]

FROM LIEN CHI ALTANGI TO FUM HOAM

Indulgent Nature seems to have exempted this island from many of those epidemic evils which are so fatal in other parts of the world. But though the nation be exempt from real evils, think not, my friend, that it is more happy on this account than others. They are afflicted, it is true, with neither famine nor pestilence, but then there is a disorder peculiar to the country, which every season makes strange ravages among them; it spreads with pestilential rapidity, and infects almost every rank of people; what is still more strange, the natives have no name for this peculiar malady, though well enough known to foreign physicians by the name of epidemic terror.

A season is never known to pass in which the people are not visited by this cruel calamity in one shape or another, seemingly different, though ever the same. The people, when once infected, lose their relish for happiness, saunter about with looks of despondence, ask after the calamities of the day, and receive no comfort but in heightening each other's distress. A dread of mad dogs is the epidemic terror which now prevails, and the whole nation is at present actually groaning under the malignity of its influence.

It is pleasant enough for a neutral being like me, who have no share in these ideal calamities, to mark the stages of this national disease. The terror at first feebly enters with a little dog that had gone through a neighbouring village, that was thought to be mad by several who had seen him. The next account comes that a mastiff ran through a certain town, and had bit five geese, which immediately ran mad, foamed at the bill, and died in great agonies soon after. Then comes an affecting history of a little boy bit in the leg, and gone down to be dipped in the salt water; when the people have sufficiently shuddered at that, they are next congealed with a frightful account of a man who was said lately to have died from a bite he had received some years before.

My landlady, a good-natured woman, but a little credulous, waked me some mornings ago, before the usual hour, with horror and astonishment in her looks; she desired me, if I had any regard for my safety, to keep within, for a few days ago so dismal an accident had happened as to put all the world upon their guard. A mad dog down in the country, she assured me, had bit a farmer who, soon becoming mad, ran into his own yard, and bit a fine brindled cow; the cow quickly became as mad as the man, began to foam at the mouth, and raising herself up, walked about on her hind legs, sometimes barking like a dog, and sometimes attempting to talk like the farmer.

Were most stories of this nature thoroughly examined, it would be found that numbers of such as have been said to suffer were in no way injured; and that of those who have been actually bitten, not one in a hundred was bit by a mad dog. Such accounts in general, therefore, only serve to make the people miserable by false terrors.

Of all the beasts that graze the lawn or hunt the forest, a dog is the only animal that, leaving his fellows, attempts to cultivate the friendship of man; no injuries can abate his fidelity; no distress induce him to forsake his benefactor; studious to please and fearing to offend, he is still an humble, steadfast dependent, and in him alone fawning is not flattery. How unkind, then, to torture this faithful creature who has left the forest to claim the protection of man! How ungrateful a return to the trusty animal for all his services! Adieu.