even before the plague had done its worst. For stricken
persons, or those supposed to be stricken, were often turned out of
their homes even by their nearest relatives, and forced to wander about
homeless and starving, none taking pity upon their misery, until the
poison in their blood did its fatal work, and they dropped down to die.

That loosening of the bands of nature and affection in times of deadly
sickness has always been one of the most terrible features of the
outbreaks of the plague when it has visited either this or other lands.
There are some forms of peril that bind men closer and closer together,
and that bring into bond of friendship even those who have been before
estranged; and terrible though these perils may be, there is always a
deep sense of underlying consolation in the closer drawing of the bond
of brotherhood. But when the scourge of deadly sickness has passed over
the land, the effect has almost always been to slacken this tie; the
inherent love of life, natural to human beings, turning to an almost
incredible selfishness, and inducing men to abandon their nearest and
dearest in the hour of peril, leaving them, if stricken, to die alone,
or turning them, sick to death though they might be, away from their
doors, to perish untended and without shelter. True, there were many
bright exceptions to such a code of barbarity, and devoted men and women
arose by the score to strive to ameliorate the condition of the
sufferers; but for all that, one of the most terrible features of the
period of death and desolation was that of the fearful panic it
everywhere produced, and the inhuman neglect and cruelty with which the
early sufferers were treated by the very persons who, perhaps only a few
days or even hours later, had themselves caught the contagion, and were
lying dead or dying in the homes from which they had ejected their own
kith and kin before.

Of the fearful havoc wrought in England by this scourge of the Black
Death many readers of history are scarcely aware. Whole districts were
actually and entirely depopulated, not a living creature of any kind
being left sometimes within a radius of many miles; and at the lowest
computation made by historians, it is believed that not less than
one-half of the entire population perished during the outbreak.

But of anything like the magnitude of such a calamity no person at this
time had any conception, and little indeed was Raymond prepared for the
sight