of my story.

The summer had been unusually gorgeous. Some had complained of the
steaming heat, but others had pointed to the lush vegetation, which
was profuse and luxuriant. The early autumn was wet and cold, but
people did not regard it, in contemplation of some proud rejoicing
of the nation, which filled every newspaper and gave food to every
tongue. In Eccleston these rejoicings were greater than in most
places; for, by the national triumph of arms, it was supposed that a
new market for the staple manufacture of the place would be opened;
and so the trade, which had for a year or two been languishing, would
now revive with redoubled vigour. Besides these legitimate causes
of good spirits, there was the rank excitement of a coming election,
in consequence of Mr Donne having accepted a Government office,
procured for him by one of his influential relations. This time,
the Cranworths roused themselves from their magnificent torpor of
security in good season, and were going through a series of pompous
and ponderous hospitalities, in order to bring back the Eccleston
voters to their allegiance.

While the town was full of these subjects by turns--now thinking and
speaking of the great revival of trade--now of the chances of the
election, as yet some weeks distant--now of the balls at Cranworth
Court, in which Mr Cranworth had danced with all the belles of the
shopocracy of Eccleston--there came creeping, creeping, in hidden,
slimy courses, the terrible fever--that fever which is never utterly
banished from the sad haunts of vice and misery, but lives in such
darkness, like a wild beast in the recesses of his den. It had begun
in the low Irish lodging-houses; but there it was so common it
excited little attention. The poor creatures died almost without the
attendance of the unwarned medical men, who received their first
notice of the spreading plague from the Roman Catholic priests.

Before the medical men of Eccleston had had time to meet together
and consult, and compare the knowledge of the fever which they had
severally gained, it had, like the blaze of a fire which had long
smouldered, burst forth in many places at once--not merely among the
loose-living and vicious, but among the decently poor--nay, even
among the well-to-do and respectable. And to add to the horror, like
all similar pestilences, its course was most rapid at first, and was
fatal in the great majority of cases--hopeless from the beginning.
Ther