Yes, I _am_ sweating now. I feel better. My head is clearer.... I wish Nagy N’Yang were here to lay her cool, ivory-white hand on my forehead where the python’s wedge-shaped head crashed against mine—on the black mark of Siva.... But my fever is breaking. Yes, I feel easier, much easier.... Yes, that is all of my story.... What? Ali Beg found us together on a giant teak log at the river’s bend at Maung Haut, where he had stopped to trade? And, tightly clasped in Nagy’s hand was something strange? Show it me! It is the belly scale of a great river python. _Burn it! Hold the night taper flame to it! Ah, that ends the fat priest’s evil spell!_ Where is Ali Beg? Here! And Nagy? Here, too!! Wheel our cots together, ma’am! Only let me clasp her hand again. Thanks; _it is warm; she is alive_! No; we won’t go up-country again. Why? Because when our first child comes, I want it born outside—out from under the shadow of the dread Curse of Siva! THE FATHER’S HAND _By_ G. HUMPHREY From _The Bookman_ _Copyright, 1918, by Dodd, Mead, and Company._ _Copyright, 1919, by George Humphrey._ The Dean and I were sitting after dinner discussing the shortage of students at Oxford since the war began. “You have no idea,” he was saying, “how strange it is to lecture to a class of four or five when one has been accustomed to forty or fifty. This morning, for instance....” “Well, Dean,” I put in, “after the war there will be no lectures on Latin poetry. The times are changing.” The old man threw back his head, and his silvery beard waved in the candle-light. “Listen,” he began, “you remember the passage where a father was trying to carve a picture of his son’s death?” “_Bis patriae manus cecidere_,” I quoted. “Twice the hands of the father fell. Icarus, was it not, for whom his father had made wings, and who flew too near the sun and fell down to earth?” He nodded. “_Bis patriae manus cecidere_—twice the father’s hands fell to his sides. In our village in the first few months of the war, there came an old man, a refugee from Alsace-Lorraine. By profession, he was a monument carver, and out of the exercise of his craft he had acquired a considerable familiarity with what one might call Phœnix-Latin, the kind that is only called into being when ‘Our Esteemed Fellow-Townsman’ dies. He had all the pedant’s love for the language. Often he would exchange tags with me when I met him in the street. “‘_Quomodo es?_ How are you,’ he would laugh in the tiny general store, to the mystification of the little spectacled proprietress. “‘_Bene, domine_,’ was my grave answer,—‘Very well, sir.’