that the
slaves usurped everything--ruling and disposing--until such time as the
sons of the slain were grown up.']

To say that there are epidemics of suicide is to give expression to
what is now a mere commonplace of knowledge. And so far are they from
being of rare occurrence, that it has even been affirmed that every
sensational case of _felo de se_ published in the newspapers is sure to
be followed by some others more obscure: their frequency, indeed, is
out of all proportion with the _extent_ of each particular outbreak.
Sometimes, however, especially in villages and small townships, the
wildfire madness becomes an all-involving passion, emulating in its
fury the great plagues of history. Of such kind was the craze in
Versailles in 1793, when about a quarter of the whole population
perished by the scourge; while that at the _Hotel des Invalides_ in
Paris was only a notable one of the many which have occurred during the
present century. At such times it is as if the optic nerve of the mind
throughout whole communities became distorted, till in the noseless and
black-robed Reaper it discerned an angel of very loveliness. As a
brimming maiden, out-worn by her virginity, yields half-fainting to the
dear sick stress of her desire--with just such faintings, wanton fires,
does the soul, over-taxed by the continence of living, yield voluntary
to the grave, and adulterously make of Death its paramour.

'When she sees a bank
Stuck full of flowers, she, with a sigh, will tell
Her servants, what a pretty place it were
To bury lovers in; and make her maids
Pluck 'em, and strew her over like a corse.'

[Footnote: Beaumont and Fletcher: _The Maid's Tragedy_.]

The _mode_ spreads--then rushes into rage: to breathe is to be
obsolete: to wear the shroud becomes _comme il faut_, this cerecloth
acquiring all the attractiveness and _eclat_ of a wedding-garment. The
coffin is not too strait for lawless nuptial bed; and the sweet clods
of the valley will prove no barren bridegroom of a writhing progeny.
There is, however, nothing specially mysterious in the operation of a
pestilence of this nature: it is as conceivable, if not yet as
explicable, as the contagion of cholera, mind being at least as
sensitive to the touch of mind as body to that of body.

It was during the ever-memorable outbreak of this obscure malady in the
year 1875 that I ventured to break in on the calm of that deep Silence
in which, as in a mant