practices had been driven from society, had united in the desert with infernal spirits, and that the Huns were the offspring of this execrable conjunction.”  But it seems to me that it is in times of intensive civilization, and in the slums of great cities, that Nature—­or anti-Nature—­originates noxious human species.  I wonder if their forefathers were, once on a time, the hooligans and yeggmen of some very ancient Babylon Bowery or the East End of some pre-Nimrodic Nineveh?  Babylon was a great city,—­or there were great cities in the neighborhood of Babylon, before the Yellow Emperor was born.  One of these may have had, God knows when, its glorious freedom-establishing revolution, its up-fountaining of sansculottes,—­patriots whose predatory proclivities had erstwhile been checked of their free brilliance by busy-body tyrannical police;—­and then this revolution may have been put down, and the men of the underworld who made turned out now from their city haunts, driven into the wilderness and the mountains,—­may have taken,—­would certainly have taken, one would say,—­not to any industry, (they knew none but such as are wrought by night unlawfully in other men’s houses); not to agriculture, which has ever had, for your free spirit, something of degradation in it;—­but to pure patriotism, freedom and liberty, as their nature was:  first to cracking such desultory cribs as offered,—­knocking down defenseless wayfarers and the like:  then to bolder raidings and excursions;—­until presently, lo, they are a great people; they have ridden over all Asia like a scirocco; they have thundered rudely at the doors of proud princes,—­troubling even the peace of the Yellow Emperor on his throne.

Well,—­but isn’t the stature stunted, physical, as well as mental and moral, when life is forced to reproduce itself, generation after generation, among the unnatural conditions of slums and industrialism? . . .  Can you nourish men upon poisons century by century, and expect them to retain the semblance of men?

They had bothered Han Kwang-wuti; who could do little more than hold his own against them, and leave them to his successor to deal with as Karma might decree.  Karma, having as you might say one watchful eye on Rome and Europe, and what need of chastisement should arise after awhile at that western end of the world, provided Han Mingti with this Pan Chow; who, being a soldier of promise, was sent upon the Hun war-path forthwith.  Then the miracles began to happen.  Pan Chow strolled through Central Asia as if upon his morning’s constitutional:  no fuss; no hurry; little fighting,—­but what there was, remarkably effective, one gathers.  Presently he found himself on the Caspian shore; and if he had left any Huns behind him, they were hardly enough to do more than pick an occasional pocket.  He started out when the Roman provinces were rising to make an end of Nero; in the last year of Domitian, from his Caspian headquarters he determined to discover