| church-yard alone, in London, received more than fifty thousand bodies in twelve months of the disease. Boccaccio ascribes its origin to India; but like other epidemics we find it following a previous great conflict. Bloody civil wars in France and Italy,a fierce struggle in Flanders, the battle of Crecy, the siege of Calais, were all immediate forerunners of the great plague. And nearly two centuries after this, in the middle of the Thirty-years' War, another plague arose. Still another succeeded the wars of the Fronde, in France. Then came the great plague of 1664, when there perished, in London and its parishes, 68,000 between April and October. This awful infliction followed the English civil war, which had been ended by the Restoration. all these nuisances are intolerable, and, in their It is a fact, that long and bloody national conflicts are usually precursors of virulent and fatal visitation of disease. Epidemics encamp behind armies. Pestilence is the rearguard of war. In the pages of Thucydides we find harrowing pictures of that dread infection which clung to the skirts of Athens during her Peloponnesian war, fulfilling the oracular prediction that "A Doric war shall fall, And a great plague withal." Calvisius writes in Latin of a terrible plague that scourged the Roman world for fifteen years, about the period when Gallus reigned; a period marked by savage intestinal conflicts, resulting in the elevation, successively, of fifty usurpers to the imperial throne. Still later, Procopius describes a pestilential visitation which traversed the Eastern Empire, just after the Persian war of Justinian, and the sanguinary popular quarrels of Red and Green factions in Byzantium-an epidemic so fatal that ten thousand deaths are reported to have occurred daily in Constantinople alone. Following the Roman invasion of Britain, a plague broke out, in Vortigern's reign, of so fierce a type as to sweep off more victims than the survivors could bury. In 1347 began the "six year plague"-known through the pages of Boccaccio as the "Plague of Florence"-which "so wasted Europe," says Calvisius, "that not the third part of the men were left alive. One And the cholera! how closely its shrouded form glided after revolution! how its ghastly death-dance attended the red carnival of war! Its birth may have been Asiatic, but its funeral foot-prints traced the map of European battlefields-from Jemappes to Moscow. Are these facts only curious coincidences, or is there an appalling connection between war and pesti Is there a mysterious lex talionis in Nature, revisiting on man the plagues which he inflicts upon earth through his bloody contentions? Are battle-plains, with their reeking dead, hospitals, with their fecund exhalations, camps, and their contagions, so many voltaic piles, charged with the subtle fluid of latent pestilence? Do wasted fields, abandoned of husbandry, nurse the germs of a future corruption, which floods shall liberate and winds disseminate broadcast over the land? We care not to speculate concerning agencies like these; but if they exist, are we secure against the innoculation of their deadly principle? It is an inquiry fraught with vital significance. At this very hour, the "cloud no bigger than a man's hand" may be densifying over some aceldama of carnage, or some fever-den of war; the cloud which, imbosoming malarious infection, shall hereafter launch its viewless bolts into the reservoirs of carbonic-acid gas; the storehouses of sulphureted hydrogen; the magazines of putrescent exuviæ, that, in crowded cities, await but a communicating virus, to become death-dealing batteries of pestilence. Here at the commercial gate of the nation, a point to which converge the most diverse business-highways, and from which radiate the most extended lines of human intercourse-here must pestilence, should it arise, find pivot and fulcrum. We have built up here our warehouses, and piled them with flour and meats; but we have here, likewise, constructed our tenant-houses, and stored them with pabulum for death. We fill our public squares with gay equipages, and our walks with refined and brilliant strangers and citizens; but we crowd our narrow lanes and hidden courts with diseased, stifled, and stunted outcasts. We appropriate miles of palaces to luxurious occupancy, but we confine thousands of souls under ground in cellars, and in airless dens and sunless rooms-there to sin, there to suffer, there to rot, and there to die, unregarded. In the city of York, the cholera of 1832 broke out in a crowded court, known as the Hagworm's Nest." In that locality raged the plague of 1664. In the same court first appeared the pestilence of 1551. During nearly three centuries, that horrid "nest" had kept intact its eggs of pest. Generation after generation dwelt around it, heedlessly, as we dwell around our "fever-nests" of the metropolis. In following the track of pestilence through different climes and ages, we encounter coincidences which establish the fact that epidemics have an affinity for endemics; or, rather, that the former usurp the dominion of the latter, claiming the localities wherein they flourished, and the subjects which they swayed. Thus, in the passage of the great plague of 1346 over Europe, and in subsequent visitations of similar diseases, the small town of Aigne Morte, in Languedoc, was repeatedly made a centre, or point d'appui, whence the distemper radiated to surrounding districts. This town has always been noted for its local disorders, arising from the malaria which overhangs, and the stagnant water that encompasses it. Milan and the healthful mountain-ranges were notably as exempt from this plague as the coasts and marsh-lands of Italy were ravaged by it. And, as in plague, so in cholera and typhus, the crowded purlieus of great cities have ever been the seats of infection. When low fevers and their concomitants become naturalized in certain localities, they serve as nuclei for the sporadic propagation of kindred diseases, whenever season and material combine to feed it. The distinctive type of the endemic may merge and be lost in its more virulent successor, but it will have performed its mission; it will have absorbed and given out the principle of poison which constitutes its affinity with plague or cholera. "It appears," says Dr. Southwood Smith, "that in many parts of Bethnal-green and Whitechapel fever of a malignant and fatal character is always more or less prevalent. In some streets it has prevailed in almost every house; in some courts, in every house; and in some few instances, in every room in every house. Cases are recorded in which every member of a family has been attacked in succession, of whom, in every such case, several have died. Some whole families have been swept away. Six persons have been found lying ill of fever in one small room." Here we have the point d'appui of a pestilence movement. It was said that early plagues might be traced to fœtid exhalations from dead locusts; and Dr. Smith, above quoted, says that "the room of a fever-patient in a small, heated apartment in London, with no perflation of fresh air, is perfectly analagous to a standing pool in Ethiopia full of bodies of dead locusts. The poison generated in both cases is the same; the difference is merely in the degree of its potency. Nature, with her burning sun, her stilled and pent-up wind, her stagnant and teeming marsh, manufactures plague on a large and fearful scale. Poverty, in her hut, covered with rags, surrounded with her filth, striving with all her might to keep out the pure air and to increase the heat, imitates nature but too successfully; the process and the product are the same; the only difference is in the magnitude of results." To this testimony, a hundred authorities add weight. Another English medical man says that he has encountered localities from which fever is seldom absent. "We find spots where spasmodic cholera located itself are also the chosen resorts of continued fever." "In damp, dark, and chilly cellars of our city, fevers, rheu matism, contagious and inflammatory disorders, affections of the lungs, skin, and eyes, too often successfully combat the skill of the physicians." Again: "The degraded habits of life, the degenerate morals, the confined and crowded apartments, and insufficient food, of those who live in more elevated rooms, comparatively beyond the reach of the exhalations of the soil, engender a different train of diseases, sufficiently distressing to contemplate; but the addition to all these causes of the foul influence of the incessant moisture and more confined air of underground rooms, is productive of evils which humanity cannot regard without shuddering." How would our 66 fever-nests" and "choleraholes" be quarantined, should the "pestilence that walketh at noon-day" fling his yellow shadow over this great metropolis? What charmed circle around the "tenant-house" neighbourhood shall taboo its deadly gases, its subtle infections, from contact with the palaces of luxury? Here, under our nostrils, the virus of small. pox continually eats into society. It is at this time fearfully on the increase, and its dreadful emanations penetrate to the rural districts. They cling to waggons and steamboats; they are dispensed through personal contagion; they lie-in-wait among second-hand garments sold in our slop-shops; they nestle in bed-clothes so plenty after periodical epidemics. But smallpox is only one of the myriad agencies of death in our midst. Now, it is better for us, as Christians and good citizens, to hear sober truth occasionally, though it be unpalatable, than to listen always to "the voice of the charmer, charm he ever so wisely." We may ignore the fact of there being latent and horrible evils in our midst, or we may, for a season, shirk our responsibility regarding them; but, sooner or later, we shall invoke, and must abide, the consequences of their protracted existence. There is an oriental story, which relates that a certain tyrant used to clothe his fierce soldiers in the skins of tigers, wolves, and other wild beasts, and set them to hunting poor people out of their beds at night, and driving them into the highways and fields, to worry and tear them, while the old king rode behind, enjoying the sport. But in punishment of this cruelty, as the legend runs, the disguised soldiers were suddenly changed into real wild beasts, and made to turn on the wicked monarch himself, who perished miserably under their teeth and claws. We are pursuing a like atrocious chase in this city at this day; hunting not only the bodies but the souls of human beings out of the pale of comfort, repose, and decency, to the highways of pauperism and the commons of crimes. We are making practical the oriental legend, in our heathen neglect of the rights, claims, and sore necessities of hundreds of thousands of the poor inhabitants of this mighty emporium of traffic. the debris of mortality was allowed to ac cumlate for ages, and where, at different epochs, bands of thieves and outlaws sought hidingplaces, and thence emerged to plunder and kill the inhabitants above. Happily, in our day, science and progress have converted these subterranean crypts into viaducts for sewer-drains, gas and water-pipes. The ancient golgothas are now become media of benefits to society, instead of remaining vaults of corruption, sheltering disease and crime. We also have our catacombs, not underground, but on the surface as distinct and loathsome as were the old tombs beneath Seine and Tiber. Our back-streets, alleys, and confined areas, over-populated with decaying humanity, and fecund with all foul things bred from slime and malaria, are nothing more or less than social graveyards in our midst, harbouring death and sheltering evils that are actually worse than death. We cannot deny this. Facts are palpable. Figures will not lie. It needs but a short turn from countries of civilization to stumble upon barbarous and savage districts, given over to society's deadly enemies Traffic, did we say? And must we repeat that it is traffic, and traffic only, which has become rule and gauge for our action as members of a great community? We traffic not only in silks, and cloths, and jewels, and spices, but in the health, honour, and life of men, women, and children. We traffic not only in bricks and mortar, but in the light of heaven, the sweetness of air, and the purity of earth. We huxter the free sunshine, doling it to human cravings as grudgingly as misers dole out their gold. We compute the minimum of air and space wherein mortal existence may linger, and make our calculation the basis for money-making out of squalor and reckless poverty. Is it not time mortal suffering. All this we do in a spirit of to do something with our catacombs? If capitraffic which invests its lucre, not in the broad, tal can erect its miles of massive store-houses noble fields of mercantile adventure, that builds and palaces, can it not build, likewise, miles of -up states and plants colonies, but in a narrow, renovated, comfortable, christianized dwellings muckworm track of speculation, wherefrom for the people who bear all social and political arise those cells and dens of mason-work that burthens-that mighty mass who are the subbrood over our filthy streets and foul alleys structure of our city, our state, and our kings. like unclean buzzards over some loathsome If capital can call navies, and armies, and govlazar-yard. With our billions of capital-ernments, and colonies into being, can it not that fulcrum on which the lever of enterprise, also create HOMES? The field is broad in our rightly adjusted, can move the world-we ex- city. Millions of people are interested directly hibit no commensurate expansion of generous in the result. public spirit such as made the Medici of Florence princes as well as merchants, and the Van Horns and Egmonts of Holland sovereigns as well as traders. We emulate not those grand old traffickers of Tyre, who reared colossal cities whenever they halted their caravans or anchored their galleys; cities whose very ruins astonish the beholder; but we rather imitate the grovelling Egyptians, who worshipped that creeping thing, the beetle, which ever toils to accumulate a muck-ball, to roll before it, as its wealth. Hence, we never ask if there be relationships connecting spacious streets with public health, or if there be affinities between decent homes and popular morals. We are satisfied to roll up our individual muck-balls to the proportions of stately warehouses and mansions, and are equally content to let other human scarabei enlarge their own filthy piles to the bulk of tenanthouses filled with all uncleanness. So, then, our gorgeous marts, our splendid churches, our stately public edifices, tower above brilliant thoroughfares, while leagues of shipping line our wharves, and untold treasures are borne, as on triumphal cars, over the iron roads of our commercial prosperity. But, all the while, we have mildew at the heart, consuming flame under regal garments, a "carrion death" in the golden casket of our seeming. Under Paris and Rome are catacombs, where RECEIPT FOR A HEAD. BY R. E. THACKERAY. Take a head which wears no bonnet, MIRIAM GILBERT'S SORROW. (A Story told in a Train.) Business rather than pleasure obliges me frequently to travel by rail, and in very different directions. One week I am away among the wolds and moors of the North, with long tracts of blackened ground, roaring furnaces, and clanging hammers; next I am gliding swiftly away among the bright flower-dotted meadows and sloping hills of the western counties; and anon I am above the grimy housetops and poisonous chimneys which hedge in the metropolitan railways. In these frequent journeys I have not failed to notice many people whose appearance seemed to entitle them to the somewhat doubtful denomination of "a character," and I have not unfrequently gathered strange stories and anecdotes from their talk. singular, and I may say romantic, than any which are usually put in the papers." 22 I pressed him to tell the story, and even the other passengers joined in my request, the young man being apparently half-bored to death by his own vacuity, and the other completely overpowered by the intricacies of Bradshaw's agreea ble tome. "The story is a mere trifle," said the banker, "but I can vouch for its truth, and such as it is you are very welcome to it. Some of you, if you know London, may have noticed, some years ago, a woman who used daily to stand near the entrance of the Bank of England. It is a busy noisy spot, as you know, and few people linger about there, but everyone is running to and fro, bent on some pursuit or other. Day after day, however, and week after week, no matter how hot the sun was on the glaring pavement, or how dismally the November fog and rain descended, the same female form, dressed in a quaint suit of black and with a head-dress resembling a nun's veil, was ever seen standing, or wandering disconsolately up and down before the great gates of the Bank of England. Few people noticed her, except those who frequented the same place daily, and they often looked curiously at the pale, sad face, with its large and melancholy brown eyes, and the strange funereal dress which enveloped the woman's body. Although Englishmen, especially travelling Englishmen, are not a communicative race, yet a long railway journey is usually productive of conversation from the most taciturn, and I have seldom been obliged to take refuge in a book or a newspaper during my many journeys. It was about two years ago that I had occasion to travel to a place about sixty miles from Lon. don, and found myself, on entering the train at Euston Square, in company with three other travellers. They were all common-place enough, and not very promising company. In one corner, remote from me, sat a vacuous-looking youth in a stiff collar and alarmingly loud tie, who gazed thoughtfully at nothing out of the window, and seemed to be thinking about it. Next to him was a sickly man in spectacles, who seemed to be hopelessly bewildered by his Bradshaw," and, knowing the extremely lucid character of that work, there is no reason to suppose that I was wrong in my conjecture. The remaining traveller sat opposite to me, and was a stout, benevolent-looking man, with a shrewd twinkle in his eye, and a certain methodical way about his dress, his hair, and his whole person, which led me to the conclusion that he was a "business-man," probably in some of those mysterious places known as "I was at that time one of the senior clerks "houses in the city." When we had gone in the bank, and I felt a singular interest in the some distance I drew the shrewd man's atten- strange, sad-eyed woman, whom I saw daily on tion (for I had mentally christened him the my way home. I noticed that punctually at a shrewd man) to a singular case of bank-quarter past four she left her place and started forgery recorded in the day's newspaper. "It is a singular case, certainly," said he, in a cheerful, pleasant voice, when he had glanced over the account, "but I have known many such: twenty years of banking life initiate a man into many such facts." "Do you mean that you have yourself witnessed as strange attempts at fraud as this?" asked I, "Certainly, sir, I know of one case far more They noticed too that she carried a small basket with her always, and that she would sometimes come forward hastily and murmur something about "her papers," and then shrink back with a wild frightened look. Many surmises were current about her. Some said she had been ruined in a law-suit and that it had turned her brain; others thought her money had been lost in some bank-failure, and that she lingered near the great bank, from a sort of fascination; one belief, however, was universal, and that was, that the poor woman was mad. off in an easterly direction, doubtless to her home; and on one occasion I determined to follow her. She took no notice of me among the crowd, and I was enabled to trace her to a small house in a mean street in Whitechapel. Having seen her enter, I knocked after a few moments' consideration, and was received by a clean-looking old woman, who asked my wishes very civilly. I told her that I had been much struck by the continual appearance of the pale. faced woman in black, and that I was anxious to know if I could serve her and why she behaved so strangely. The old woman shook her head sadly, and said. "Ah! sir, you're very kind to notice poor Miriam, and indeed she's one that would attract attention; her story is a very sad one. If you will come in for a few minutes you can see what her sorrow has brought her to." I entered the house, for I was really interested, and was shown into a small close room, which was, however, scrupulously clean, and adorned with flowers and a few poor trifles such as woman's taste supplies even under the meanest roof. In a few minutes the door opened, and the object of my curiosity entered. She seemed about five-and-twenty years old, and was, now that she had abandoned her black head-dress, a very pretty woman. Her face, however, was painfully and unnaturally pale and bloodless, and her lustrous eyes had a look of intense longing mixed with a bewildered and frightened air. She bowed very gracefully to me, and asked me in a low, earnest voice, if there was a reprieve yet. "Entering into her humour, I told her 'No, not yet.' Then I have killed him-my own, my dear one!' she cried, in such a voice of agony that it thrilled through me, and, sinking on a chair, she covered her white face with her hands. The old woman now came forward, calmed her after a while, and then led her from the room, and afterwards told me briefly the history of poor Miriam Gilbert. "Few homes had been happier than that of Miriam Gilbert and her brother Edward. Edward Gilbert had for some years held a responsible position in a thriving bank, and was universally respected as an honest and steady man. He and his sister lived in a small cottage in the suburbs, which the womanly taste and sisterly love of Miriam converted into a little bower of flowers and pretty trifles, among which she busied herself all day, and was ever ready to greet her brother on his return from business in the evening. Gradually, however, a cloud stole over their hitherto happy home; Edward Gilbert was often absent during the hours which he formerly devoted to his sister; his manner, too, became restless and pre-occupied, and his once smooth temper was alternately moody and wildly excited. He was extravagant, too; whereas he had once entrusted most of his slender income to Miriam's care. His sister was far too confident in her brother's virtue to suspect the real cause of these changes, and when the final blow came, it was all the more overwhelming because unexpected. One evening a gig drove up to the door of the cottage; two men descended from it, and asked at the door for Edward Gilbert. They were shown, by Miriam, into the room where her brother was lying upon a sofa near the piano, at which Miriam had been playing. Edward Gilbert sprang to his feet with a hasty exclamation of alarm, when one of the strangers came forward and said, in a quiet tone: "Mr. Gilbert, I must arrest you, on a charge of forgery. Here is my warrant.' "The unfortunate man turned pale, and, staggering back, would have fallen had not Miriam supported him. She was at first too astonished to understand the scene rightly; but when the truth dawned upon her, her astonishment gave place to anger, and her indignant denial of her brother's guilt moved the hearts of the officers, well accustomed as they were to scenes of misery. Edward Gilbert was examined on a charge of a long and systematic forgery, during which he had obtained more than £3,000, and was When the trial came on, committed for trial. the evidence against the prisoner, though of a strongly presumptive character, was not conclusive, and the counsel for the defence was in high hopes of an acquittal, when Miriam Gilbert was called as a witness. Her beautiful face, and sad, earnest look created universal sympashe begin to give her evidence than the prisonthy throughout the Court; but no sooner did er's counsel perceived that she was the most dangerous witness they could possibly bring forward, and at once tried to get her out of the witness-box. The prosecuting counsel, however, a keen lawyer, at once commenced a careful and searching cross-examination, and soon drew from Miriam that she had been in the actuated by feelings of love and care lest he habit of watching her brother in his study, should be ill or in trouble, and had there seen him busied with writing, signing cheques which he afterwards used, and said were paid to him at the bank. Miriam was so convinced of her brother's innocence that she described the appearance of these cheques minutely, never doubting that the evidence would effectually establish Edward's innocence. Her evidence was however conclusive, and left no doubt on the minds of the jury; the prisoner's counsel sat down with a significant look at his learned brother on the other side, and after the judge had summed up, the jury at once returned the fatal verdict, Guilty." "At that time death was the punishment awarded to the crime of forgery, and the prisoner was sentenced accordingly. To describe the wild sorrow of Miriam Gilbert, who was anxiously awaiting an acquittal, would be impossible. The shock was altogether overwhelming. She called herself her brother's murderer, and even the wretched prisoner, in the first agony of his sentence, accused his sister with causing his death. Before the fatal day arrived, however, Edward Gilbert confessed his crime, and tried to comfort his sister. But her young life had been blighted for ever, and, before her brother expiated his crime by the too cruel sentence of the law, Miriam Gilbert was insane. Ever since that time she lived with an old and faithful friend (she who told me the story), and had |