"16. They" (the people) "that fear the hoary frost, _the snow shall fall upon them_. "17. At the time _when they shall be scattered they shall perish;_ and after it _groweth hot they shall be melted out of their place_. "18. The paths of their steps are entangled; _they shall walk in vain and shall perish_." There is a great deal of perishing here--some by frost and snow, some by heat; the people are scattered, they lose their way, they perish. {p. 289} Job's servants and sheep were also consumed in their place; _they_ came to naught, _they_ perished. Job begins to think, like the Aztec priest, that possibly the human race has reached its limit and is doomed to annihilation (chap. vii): "1. Is there not an appointed time to man upon earth? Are not his days also like the days of an hireling?" Is it not time to discharge the race from its labors? "4. When I lie down, I say, When shall I arise, _and the night be gone?_ and I am full of tossings to and fro unto _the dawning of the day_." He draws a picture of his hopeless condition, shut up in the cavern, never to see the light of day again. (Douay ver., chap. vii): "12: Am I sea or a whale, _that thou hast inclosed me in a prison?_" "7. My eyes _shall not return to see good things_. "8. Nor shall the sight of man behold me; thy eyes are upon me, and I shall be no more"; (or, as one translates it, thy mercy shall come too late when I shall be no more.) "9. As a cloud is consumed and passeth away, so he that shall go down to hell" (or the grave, the cavern) shall not come up. "10. Nor shall he return any more into his house, neither shall his place know him any more." How strikingly does this remind one of the Druid legend, given on page 135, _ante_: "The profligacy of mankind had provoked the Great Supreme to send a pestilential wind upon the earth. A pure poison descended, every blast was death. At this time the patriarch, _distinguished for his integrity_, was _shut up, together with his select company_, in the inclosure with the strong door. Here the just ones were safe from injury. Presently a tempest of fire arose," etc. {p. 290} Who can doubt that these widely separated legends refer to the same event and the same patriarch? Job meditates suicide, just as we have seen in the American legends that hundreds slew themselves under the terror of the time: "21. For now shall I sleep in the dust; and thou shalt seek me in the morning, but I shall not be." The Chaldaic version gives us the sixteenth and seventeenth verses of chapter viii as follows: "The sun is no sooner risen with a burning heat but it withereth the grass, and the flower thereof faileth, and the grace of the fashion of it perisheth, so also shall the rich man fade away in his ways." And then Job refers to the power of God, seeming to paint the cataclysm (chap. ix): "5. Which _removeth the mountains_, and they know not which _overturneth them in his anger_.