The same zeal for their task prevails in the second class of scavengers. The village hardly knows those ammonia-scented refuges whither we repair, in the towns, to relieve our wretched needs. A little wall no higher than that, a hedge, a bush is all that the peasant asks as a retreat at the moment when he would fain be alone. I need say no more to suggest the encounters to which such free and easy manners expose you! Enticed by the patches of lichen, the cushions of moss, the tufts of homewort and other pretty things that adorn old stones, you go up to a sort of wall that supports the ground of a vineyard. Ugh! At the foot of the daintily-decked shelter, what a spreading abomination! You flee: lichens, mosses and homewort tempt you no more. But come back on the morrow. The thing has disappeared, the place is clean: the Dung-beetles have been that way. To preserve the eyes from offensive sights too oft repeated is, to those gallant fellows, the least of offices: a loftier mission is incumbent on them. Science tells us that the most dreadful scourges of mankind have their agents in tiny organisms, the microbes, near neighbours of must and mould, on the extreme confines of the vegetable kingdom. The terrible germs multiply by countless myriads in the intestinal discharges at times of epidemic. They contaminate the air and water, those primary necessities of life; they spread over our linen, our clothes, our food and thus diffuse contagion. We have to destroy by fire, to sterilize with corrosives or to bury underground such things as are soiled with them. Prudence even demands that we should never allow ordure to linger on the surface of the ground. It may be harmless, it may be dangerous: when in doubt, the best thing is to put it out of sight. That is how ancient wisdom seems to have understood the thing, long before the microbe explained to us the great need for vigilance. The nations of the East, more exposed to epidemics than ourselves, had formal laws in these matters. Moses, apparently echoing Egyptian knowledge in this connection, prescribed the line of conduct for his people wandering in the Arabian desert: “Thou shalt have a place without the camp,” he says, “to which thou mayst go for the necessities of nature, carrying a paddle at thy girdle. And, when thou sittest down, thou shalt dig round about and, with the earth that is dug up, thou shalt cover that which thou art eased of.” (Deut., XXIII., xii–xiv.) This is a precept of grave import in its simplicity. And we may well believe that, if Islamism, at the time of its great pilgrimages to the Kaaba, were to take the same precaution and a few more of a similar character, Mecca would cease to be an annual seat of cholera and Europe would not need to mount guard on the shores of the Red Sea to protect herself against the scourge.