The very architecture of the Chinese home is to keep the devils out. The strange curves with the graceful upward sweep that makes the roofs so beautiful to American eyes is for the purpose of throwing devils of the air off the track. They will come down from the skies and start down the curve of the roofs but will be turned back into the skies again by the upward slant of the twisted roofs.
It was this same terrible sense of fear which developed the old surgical system that the Koreans and Chinese used before the arrival of the missionaries.
"Do you see these needles?" an American surgeon in Korea asked me one day, as he pointed to about a hundred of the most horrible looking copper and brass needles lying on a stand.
"Yes," I admitted, mystified.
"I have taken every one of them out of the bodies of human beings on whom I have operated here in the hospital."
"Where did you find them?"
"In between the bowels, in the muscles, in the organs of the body, and one in the heart of a man who came to me because he couldn't breathe very well."
"No wonder the fellow couldn't breathe. I don't think I could myself if I had a needle in my blood-pump!" I said with a smile.
"These fancy needles that the old Korean doctors thought a good deal of they put a handle on," he continued.
"What was that for?"