, even in
the foulest dens of that sea-port, to produce the disease in his own
person, or to carry it in his saturated clothing to the healthier
quarters of the town where he himself had his lodging.[17] Surely
if the disease had been typhus fever, or any other capable of
contaminating the atmosphere of a sick apartment, or giving out
infection more directly from the body of a patient, the result must
have been different; its course, notwithstanding, has been most
unaccountably and peculiarly its own--slow and sure for the most part,
the infected wave has rolled on from its tropical origin in the far
distant east, to the borders of the arctic circle in the west--not
unfrequently in the face of the strongest winds, as if the blighting
action of those atmospherical currents had prepared the surface of the
earth, as well as the human body for the reception and deposition of
the poison; but so far from always following the stream and line of
population as has been attempted to be shown, it has often run
directly counter to both, seldom or never desolating the large cities
of Europe, like the plague and other true contagions, but rather
wasting its fury upon encampments of troops, as in the east, or the
villages and hamlets of thickly peopled rural districts.

[Footnote 17: The numbers were so great (to which I should probably
have added one had my health permitted) as actually to make gala day in
Sunderland, and to call forth a public expression of regret at their
departure.]

That it could have been descried on no other than the above line must be
self-evident, but to say that it has followed it in the manner that a
contagious disease ought to have done, in our own country for instance,
is at variance with the fact. From Sunderland and Newcastle to the south,
the ways were open, the stream of population dense and continuous, the
conveyances innumerable, the communications uninterrupted and constant.
Towards the thinly-peopled north how different the aspect,--townships
rare, the country often high, cold, and dreary, in many parts of the line
without inhabitants or the dwellings of man for many miles together,
yet does the disease suddenly alight at Haddington, a hundred miles off,
without having touched the towns of Berwick, Dunbar, or any of the
intermediate places. It is said to have been carried there by vagrant
paupers from Sunderland. Can this be true? Could any such with the
disease upon them in any shape, have enco