“Don’t you find it interesting, Nance, rummaging among these musty old religions of a dead past—­though I admit that this one is less pleasant to study than most of the others.  This god seems to lack the majesty and beauty of the Greek and the integrity of the Norse gods.  In fact, he was too crude to be funny—­by the way, what is it I seem to recall, about eating the flesh and drinking the blood of the son?—­’unless ye eat the flesh of the son—­’”

She drew her hand from his now and arose in some dismay.  He lay back upon his pillow, smiling.

“Not very agreeable, is it, Nance?  Well, come again, and I’ll tell you about some of the pleasanter old faiths next time—­I remember now that they interested me a lot before I was sick.”

“You’re sure I shouldn’t send Clytie or some one?” She looked down at him anxiously, putting her hand on his forehead.  He put one of his own lightly over hers.

“No, no, thank you!  It’s not near time yet for the next baked potato.  If Clytie doesn’t give up the skin of this one I shall be tempted to forget that she’s a woman.  There, I hear grandad coming, so you won’t be leaving me alone.”

Grandfather Delcher came in cheerily as Nancy left the room.

“Resting, my boy?  That’s good.  You look brighter already—­Nancy must come often.”

He took Nancy’s chair by the couch and began the reading of his morning’s mail.  Bernal lay still with eyes closed during the reading of several letters; but when the old man opened out a newspaper with little rustlings and pats, he turned to him.

“Well, my boy?”

“I’ve been thinking of something funny.  You know, my memory is still freakish, and things come back in splotches.  Just now I was recalling a primitive Brazilian tribe in whose language the word ‘we’ means also ’good.  ‘Others,’ which they express by saying ‘not we,’ means also ‘evil.’  Isn’t that a funny trait of early man—­we—­good; not we—­bad!  I suppose our own tongue is but an elaboration of that simple bit of human nature—­a training of polite vines and flowering shrubs over the crude lines of it.

“And this tribe—­the Bakairi, it is called—­is equally crude in its religion.  It is true, sir, is it not, that the most degraded of the savages tribes resort to human sacrifice in their religious rites?”

“Generally true.  Human sacrifice was practised even by some who were well advanced, like the Aztecs and Peruvians.”

“Well, sir, this Bakairi tribe believed that its god demanded a sacrifice yearly, and their priests taught them that a certain one of their number had been sent by their god for this sacrifice each year; that only by butchering this particular member of the tribe and—­incredible as it sounds—­eating his body and drinking his blood, could they avert drouth and pestilence and secure favours for the year to come.  I remember the historian intimated that it were well not to incur the displeasure of any priest; that one doing this might find it followed by an unpleasant circumstance when the time came for the priests to designate the next yearly sacrifice.”