se-water (it certainly was not rose-water which reeked
along our passages), and fever germs can be exterminated, it seems, by
nothing less exasperatingly unsavoury than carbolic acid, an agency which
was laid on without any ruth. Grumblers were offered the alternative of
being smoked with sulphur. Some complained of sore throats, contracted,
they said, from the fumes of the disinfectant, and declared that the
remedy, like vaccination, was only a mitigated form of the disorder. The
landlords of our studies looked on with irresolute wonder, when some of
us sprinkled their floors with a potent decoction poured from watering-
pots. Most of them regarded it as a kind of magical rite into which it
would not be seemly to inquire. In one house a practical seaman, late
home from a cruise, took a less reverent view of the lustration, and
uttered hints of what he would do to the perpetrators' heads if their
acid touched his carpets again. Probably the best disinfectant applied
was the clear strong wind, which ten days after the first case succeeded
the previous relaxing weather. All windows and doors were ordered wide
open for the free passage of the blast; and the boys were directed to
bring down their rugs, great-coats, and dressing-gowns, and anything of
the kind which might be supposed to harbour mischief, and spread them for
purification on the pebbles of the beach. It will be believed the scene
was a quaint one, however it might remind the scholar of the idyllic
laundry scene by the Phaeacian shore, where Nausicaa and her maidens:

[Greek verse]

Whether it was these purgations, or the fumes of the carbolic which
exorcised the infection, or whether the pest was starved out by the
immediate and careful isolation of the cases that occurred, we must leave
doctors to determine. It is certain that the epidemic came to an end in
less than ten days after the first case. That we were able to apply the
most necessary of measures, that of isolating at once all cases declared
or suspected, we owe to the readiness of the villagers to put house-room
at our service, a readiness on which we certainly had no right to
calculate. The rent we might pay them was no measure of the service
rendered. If a panic had closed their doors, our situation would have
been worse than critical.

The cause of the outbreak could not be confidently assigned, but since
the most probable theory traced it to a recent railway excursion made by
som