en among those who were playing round the fountain
about a fortnight since, although he was not one whom the red-haired
tramp had touched, but the other two had not been near the fountain. The
presumption was, therefore, that they had contracted the disease through
some other source of infection, perhaps at the lodging-house where the
man had spent the night after bathing in the water. Also it seemed that,
drawn thither by the heat, in all two or three hundred children had
visited the fountain square on this particular evening, and that many of
them had drunk water out of the basin.

Never do I remember feeling more frightened than when these facts came
to my knowledge, for, added to the possible terrors of the position, was
my constitutional fear of the disease which I have already described. On
my way homewards I met a friend who told me that one of the children was
dead, the malady, which was of an awful type, having done its work very
swiftly.

Like a first flake from a snow-cloud, like a first leaf falling in
autumn from among the myriads on some great tree, so did this little
life sink from our number into the silence of the grave. Ah! how many
were to follow? There is a record, I believe, but I cannot give it. In
Dunchester alone, with its population of about 50,000, I know that
we had over 5000 deaths, and Dunchester was a focus from which the
pestilence spread through the kingdom, destroying and destroying and
destroying with a fury that has not been equalled since the days of the
Black Death.

But all this was still to come, for the plague did not get a grip at
once. An iron system of isolation was put in force, and every possible
means was adopted by the town authorities, who, for the most part, were
anti-vaccinationists, to suppress the facts, a task in which they were
assisted by the officials of the Local Government Board, who had their
instructions on the point. As might have been expected, the party in
power did not wish the political position to be complicated by an outcry
for the passing of a new smallpox law, so few returns were published,
and as little information as possible was given to the papers.

For a while there was a lull; the subject of smallpox was _taboo_, and
nobody heard much about it beyond vague and indefinite rumours. Indeed,
most of us were busy with the question of the hour--the eternal question
of beer, its purity and the method of its sale. For my part, I made
few inquiries; l