The story-teller has an inexhaustible store of adventures, and romances, and love scenes, and great episodes in history upon which to draw. He has also the free use of his pictorial powers in drawing the scenes and pictures with which he would stir the imagination and the enthusiasm of his audiences. Many of these men are real artists in their profession, and they can hold their hearers spellbound whilst they give a realistic picture of some stirring event that happened ages ago, or of some great catastrophe in which a dynasty disappeared amidst scenes of carnage and bloodshed, and the new one came in to the sound of music and amidst the rejoicings of a nation. They are, however, a vulgar, dissipated set of men, and though they do occasionally get inspired with their subjects and rise to high flights of eloquence, there is not a single noble feature about them. It is not love for their art that makes them reproduce the comedies and tragedies of the past, but an irrepressible longing for the opium, which has put its leaden hues on their faces, and its fierce and unholy craving into their hearts. There is another profession that ought to stand the very highest amongst all the honourable occupations that give men employment in this land, and that is the one that might in a rough and general way be called that of "interpreter of the gods." This individual occupies the position he does not by any human choice, but by the special selection of the idol for whom he is to act. A vacancy, say, occurs in a particular temple, and a man must be appointed who can report to the worshippers the answers that the god has to give them to the particular petitions they have made to it. Without such a man the idol is dumb. It has a mouth, but it cannot speak; it has eyes, but they look out of wooden sockets, and no tears of sympathy have ever been known to fall from them; and it has a face with human features, but no story, the most pathetic that was ever told in the hearing of man, has ever been known to cause it to be suffused with emotion or to touch the cold and passionless features with a touch of pity. The man that aspires to occupy this high position must go through a certain ordeal before he can be accepted by the temple authorities as the one whom the idol is willing to employ to be the medium by which it shall communicate its purposes to the people. A certain weird ceremony is performed in front of the god during some dark night, when only a candle or two show the idol surrounded by the mystery of darkness. Incantations are slowly chanted, and invocations made to the wooden image to inspire the man that stands motionless in front of it. The tap of a drum now and again sounds as a kind of bass note to the higher notes of the reciter of the vague and mystic language that is supposed to move the idol to a manifestation of its will.