All night long the curdled cloud lay low upon the hills, wrapping in its hot blanket the sweltering breathless town; and rolled off sullenly when the sun rose high, to let him pour down his glare, and quicken into evil life all evil things.  For Baalzebub is a sunny fiend; and loves not storm and tempest, thunder, and lashing rains; but the broad bright sun, and broad blue sky, under which he can take his pastime merrily, and laugh at all the shame and agony below; and, as he did at his great banquet in New Orleans once, madden all hearts the more by the contrast between the pure heaven above and the foul hell below.

And up and down the town the foul fiend sported, now here now there; snapping daintily at unexpected victims, as if to make confusion worse confounded:  to belie Thurnall’s theories and prognostics, and harden the hearts of fools by fresh excuses for believing that he had nothing to do with drains and water; that he was “only”—­such an only!—­“the Visitation of God.”

He has taken old Beer’s second son; and now he clutches at the old man himself; then across the street to Gentleman Jan, his eldest:  but he is driven out from both houses by chloride of lime and peat dust, and the colony of the Beers has peace awhile.

Alas! there are victims enough and to spare beside them, too ready for the sacrifice, and up the main street he goes unabashed, springing in at one door and at another, on either side of the street, but fondest of the western side, where the hill slopes steeply down to the house-backs.

He fleshes his teeth on every kind of prey.  The drunken cobbler dies, of course:  but spotless cleanliness and sobriety does not save the mother of seven children, who has been soaking her brick floor daily with water from a poisoned well, defiling where she meant to clean.  Youth does not save the buxom lass, who has been filling herself, as girls will do, with unripe fruit:  nor innocence the two fair children who were sailing their feather-boats yesterday in the quay-pools, as they have sailed them for three years past, and found no hurt; piety does not save the bed-ridden old dame, bed-ridden in the lean-to garret, who moans, “It is the Lord!” and dies.  It is “the Lord” to her, though Baalzebub himself be the angel of release.

And yet all the while sots and fools escape where wise men fall; weakly women, living amid all wretchedness, nurse, unharmed, strong men who have breathed fresh air all day.  Of one word of Scripture at least Baalzebub is mindful; for “one is taken and another left.”

Still, there is a method in his seeming madness.  His eye falls on a blind alley, running back from the main street, backed at the upper end by a high wall of rock.  There is a God-send for him—­a devil’s-send, rather, to speak plain truth:  and in he dashes; and never leaves that court, let brave Tom wrestle with him as he may, till he has taken one from every house.