With misplaced zeal, and little thinking that it would cost many of them their lives and liberties, these enthusiasts gave it out that the new Revelation ran as follows:  “everything derivable from dead beasts is Abomination to Little White Cows.”  They had been inspired to insert the word dead because sheep’s wool, for example, was an article of clothing in which they greatly delighted, and they could not bring themselves to deprive the faithful of this gift of God.

Even as it stood, the Commandment entailed severe sacrifices on the part of the Sacred Sixty-three.  No boot-leather, no picturesque belts, no bone knife-handles or combs, no tallow candles. . . .  They were prepared, none the less, to carry out to the letter this injunction, since it gave them what all religious people require—­something to torment themselves with; and this is how matters stood when, on that morning, a stalwart batch of new-comers from the wilds of Muscovy, burning with the ardour of abnegation and wholly ignorant of local laws and customs, sauntered across the market-place in freshly purchased hempen sandals.

Tobacco being derivable neither from warm-blooded beasts nor yet from dead ones, a member of the band bethought himself of the fact that he had run out of cigarettes.  Knowing not a word of Italian he entered the shop of a tobacconist and imitated the gesture of smoking with such success that the proprietor straightway understood and supplied him with a packet.  Then he remembered that he also needed matches.  This called for a gesture rather more complex; so complex, indeed, that perhaps nobody but a Nepenthean—­gifted, as all his nation is, with alert intuition—­could have divined the Apostle’s want.  The tobacconist was equal to the occasion.  With a friendly smile of comprehension he laid on the counter a diminutive pack of wax vestas, price two sous.

There the matter might have rested but for the new Revelation, which prompted the sturdy stranger to investigate the composition of the article tendered.  He took out one match and examined it carefully.  Then, triturating its substance between his fingers, he applied his nose to the product and sniffed critically.  The outcome was suspicious in the highest degree.  There was no perceptible odour of beeswax; the object had been compounded, only too plainly, of the fat of dead animals; it was the Abomination, the Unclean Thing.  Devout, and gifted with the hot impulse of youth, he acted precisely as he would have acted in Russia under a similar provocation.  With a third gesture, one of abhorrence and ungovernable fury, he threw the box in the tobacconist’s face.

And there the matter, once more, might have rested, had the salesman been a Russian.  Russians understand frank dealing.

He happened to be a native.