swept away, and the
place had been taken possession of for the time being by the
authorities, to be used as a supplementary pest house, where the
homeless sick could be temporarily housed. Generally it was but for
a few hours or a couple of days that such shelter was needed. The
great common grave, barely a quarter of a mile away, received day
by day the great majority of the unfortunate ones who were brought
in.

In all London proper there were only two pest houses used at this
time, one on some fields beyond Old Street, and the other in
Westminster; but as the virulence of the distemper increased, and
the suburbs became so terribly infected, and such numbers of
persons fleeing this way and that would fall stricken by the
wayside, it became necessary to find places of some sort where they
could be received, and the authorities began to take possession of
empty houses--generally farmsteads standing in a convenient but
isolated position--and to use them for this melancholy purpose. It
could not be expected that even the most charitable would receive
plague-stricken wayfarers into their own families, nor would such a
thing be right. Yet they could not remain by the wayside to die and
infect the air. So they were removed by the bearers appointed to
that gruesome work to these smaller pest houses, and only too often
from thence to the pit in the course of a few hours.

"How pretty it all looks!" said Benjamin, as they approached the
place. "See, Joseph, those are the great elm trees where the rooks
build, and which I used to climb. When they cut the hay, I came
often and rolled about in it and played with the boys from the
farm. To think that they should all be dead and gone! Alack! what
strange times these be! It seems sometimes as though it were all a
dream!"

"I would it were!" said Joseph, sobered by the thought of their
near approach to the habitation of death. "Ben, wouldst thou rather
turn back and see no more? We have at least seen the outside of a
pest house. Shall that suffice us?"

"Nay, if we have come so far, let us go further," answered
Benjamin. "We have seen naught but the tiled roof and the green
garden. Come this way. There is a little gate by which we may gain
entrance to a side door. Perchance they will turn us back if we
seek to enter at the front."

The farm house looked peaceful enough nestling beneath its
sheltering row of tall elms, in the midst of its wild garden, now a
mass of autumnal b