fering from
some form of mania.

As soon as he saw me the man dropped the last child he had caught--it
was little Tottie Smith--and began to stride away towards the city
at the same slow, regular, purposeful gait with which I had seen him
approach the fountain. As he passed he turned and made a grimace at
me, and then I saw his dreadful face. No wonder it had looked red at
a distance, for the _erythema_ almost covered it, except where, on the
forehead and cheeks, appeared purple spots and patches.

Of what did it remind me?

Great Heaven! I remembered. It reminded me of the face of that girl I
had seen lying in the _plaza_ of San Jose, in Mexico, over whom the old
woman was pouring water from the fountain, much such a fountain as
that before me, for half unconsciously, when planning this place, I had
reproduced its beautiful design. It all came back to me with a shock,
the horrible scene of which I had scarcely thought for years, so vividly
indeed that I seemed to hear the old hag's voice crying in cracked
accents, "_Si, senor, viruela, viruela!_"

I ought to have sent to warn the police and the health officers of the
city, for I was sure that the man was suffering from what is commonly
called confluent smallpox. But I did not. From the beginning there has
been something about this terrible disease which physically and morally
has exercised so great an influence over my destiny, that seemed to
paralyse my mental powers. In my day I was a doctor fearless of any
other contagion; typhus, scarletina, diphtheria, yellow fever, none
of them had terrors for me. And yet I was afraid to attend a case of
smallpox. From the same cause, in my public speeches I made light of it,
talking of it with contempt as a sickness of small account, much as a
housemaid talks in the servants' hall of the ghost which is supposed to
haunt the back stairs.

And now, coming as it were from that merry and populous chamber of
life and health, once again I met the Spectre I derided, a red-headed,
red-visaged Thing that chose me out to stop and grin at. Somehow I was
not minded to return and announce the fact.

"Why," they would say, "_you_ were the one who did not believe in
ghosts. It was _you_ who preached of vile superstitions, and yet merely
at the sight of a shadow you rush in with trembling hands and bristling
hair to bid us lay it with bell, book, and candle. Where is your faith,
O prophet?"

It was nonsense; the heat and all my incessa