nd what my future actions were to be. In
the feeling communicated to me by the sight of one struck by the plague, I
forgot the events that had excited me so strongly in London; new and more
painful prospects, by degrees were cleared of the mist which had hitherto
veiled them. The question was no longer whether I should share Adrian's
toils and danger; but in what manner I could, in Windsor and the
neighbourhood, imitate the prudence and zeal which, under his government,
produced order and plenty in London, and how, now pestilence had spread
more widely, I could secure the health of my own family.

I spread the whole earth out as a map before me. On no one spot of its
surface could I put my finger and say, here is safety. In the south, the
disease, virulent and immedicable, had nearly annihilated the race of man;
storm and inundation, poisonous winds and blights, filled up the measure of
suffering. In the north it was worse--the lesser population gradually
declined, and famine and plague kept watch on the survivors, who, helpless
and feeble, were ready to fall an easy prey into their hands.

I contracted my view to England. The overgrown metropolis, the great heart
of mighty Britain, was pulseless. Commerce had ceased. All resort for
ambition or pleasure was cut off--the streets were grass-grown--the
houses empty--the few, that from necessity remained, seemed already
branded with the taint of inevitable pestilence. In the larger
manufacturing towns the same tragedy was acted on a smaller, yet more
disastrous scale. There was no Adrian to superintend and direct, while
whole flocks of the poor were struck and killed. Yet we were not all to die.
No truly, though thinned, the race of man would continue, and the great
plague would, in after years, become matter of history and wonder.
Doubtless this visitation was for extent unexampled--more need that we
should work hard to dispute its progress; ere this men have gone out in
sport, and slain their thousands and tens of thousands; but now man had
become a creature of price; the life of one of them was of more worth than
the so called treasures of kings. Look at his thought-endued countenance,
his graceful limbs, his majestic brow, his wondrous mechanism--the type
and model of this best work of God is not to be cast aside as a broken
vessel--he shall be preserved, and his children and his children's
children carry down the name and form of man to latest time.

Above all I must