. A'Chu and other stories. smart one, an upstart indeed, whodared believe he had found a better religion thanthe worship of the gods which their forefathers hadserved for generations. To *be sure, there had been times when these sameold villagers themselves had lost patience with thegods, but that, as they thought, did not prove themaltogether useless and bad. These were times when thegrowing crops needed rain which the heavens did notsend. Without rain there could be no crop, and with-out a crop there must be famine, suffering, and deathamong the inhabitants of the district. At such times the
. A'Chu and other stories. smart one, an upstart indeed, whodared believe he had found a better religion thanthe worship of the gods which their forefathers hadserved for generations. To *be sure, there had been times when these sameold villagers themselves had lost patience with thegods, but that, as they thought, did not prove themaltogether useless and bad. These were times when thegrowing crops needed rain which the heavens did notsend. Without rain there could be no crop, and with-out a crop there must be famine, suffering, and deathamong the inhabitants of the district. At such times the old men acting as fathers ofthe village had declared a holiday. Everybody went318 Deliverance of Keh and His Son 319 to the shrines and temples to plead for rain. Theyfeasted the gods, and when they were supposed to befull of good things, prayed for rain upon their parchedland, that the worshipers, too, might eat and be rain did not come, they became disgustedwith gods so careless of their needs. They then. LEJ<T OUT 1JN THE SUN took measures to convince the idols of the intensity ofthe heat and severity of the drouth. The principalrain god was carried out into an open space andset in the sun without food or drink, sometimes fordays, till he should feel what it is to be hungry andthirsty and scorched with heat. 320 AChu mid Other Stories I once knew of a village where the people, on oc-casion of a prolonged drouth, left their god in thesun without food or drink for three weeks, till the headof the wooden idol cracked with the heat. He wasinsulted with jeering and spitting, showered with fire-crackers and rockets, and serenaded with metal gongsto keep him awake till he could suffer it no longer,and would answer the peoples prayers for rain. But punishment of careless gods was a very dif-ferent thing to them from forsaking their worshipaltogether. The idea that Keh Cheng Soan pro-fessed that he had found a better God or a moreeffectual worship, was beyond the b
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