"It was a few days later that my dear husband was eaten by a crocodile while he was fishing. There being no remains we had a modest private funeral, none but the family being present; and I took up as best I could the duties of providing for my children. "After their father's death the children talked still more to Bahgung and told him all their troubles. They seemed to love the idol and yet to fear him, and to believe he was alive though they could see him before them as only a carved wooden thing. "So much they worshiped Bahgung that I feared to destroy him, and I therefore allowed the wooden idol to stand on the mantle over the old horsehair sofa that we had brought with us from another world. "I still supposed that when the children grew up they would forget this miserable idol of carven wood. But alas! they did not. I did not dare destroy the idol, for the children adored it more than they did me who had brought them into the world of my own flesh and blood. I wanted also to explain to them that Bahgung was only a wooden idol and as dead and worthless as any rotten stick, but being dumb I could say nothing. "When my children left home, they would come back on pilgrimages, and to me it seemed that they came back more to worship Bahgung than to see their old mother. So in my desire to see my children the more I permitted Bahgung to stand on the mantle above the horsehair sofa in the cave. "One day my oldest son and oldest daughter came at the same time to visit me and to worship Bahgung. It was then that my son proposed that he take Bahgung to his own cave. Being dumb I could say nothing, but my daughter objected. "'Very well,' said my son, 'leave the old thing here. I will make a better one of my own.' "The next time I visited my son, I found that he, too, had made a creature, which he modeled out of clay, even more cleverly than his father had carved. And this creature was sitting on a little pedestal in a small cave of its own and my son was teaching my grandchildren to bring it offerings and make worship and prayers to it--all of which I thought most silly. "Finally I died and my numerous descendants gave me a grand funeral and paraded Bahgung at the head of the procession and all their lesser idols after him. But being dumb and dead also, I could say nothing. "So that was how it all started, the idol worship, in that world you see below us, and for thousands on thousands of generations those poor deluded descendants of mine made and worshiped idols of wood and clay and stone and metal, while I hovered over them, knowing all the while how the delusion started in my own dear husband's innocent desire to amuse our children with a home-made toy." "That is a very interesting account of the origin of idol worship," commented Gud, "I never heard so plausible a theory."