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remember--though you are hardly old enough--the cattle-plague? How the
beasts died, or had to be killed and buried, by tens of thousands; and
how misery and ruin fell on hundreds of honest men and women over many of
the richest counties of England: but how we in this vale had no cattle-
plague; and how there was none--as far as I recollect--in the uplands of
Devon and Cornwall, nor of Wales, nor of the Scotch Highlands? Now, do
you know why that was? Simply because we here, like those other
uplanders, are in such a country as Palestine was before the foolish Jews
cut down all their timber, and so destroyed their own rainfall--a "land
of brooks of water, of fountains and depths that spring out of valleys
and hills." There is hardly a field here that has not, thank God, its
running brook, or its sweet spring, from which our cattle were drinking
their health and life, while in the clay-lands of Cheshire, and in the
Cambridgeshire fens--which were drained utterly dry--the poor things
drank no water, too often, save that of the very same putrid ponds in
which they had been standing all day long, to cool themselves, and to
keep off the flies. I do not say, of course, that bad water caused the
cattle-plague. It came by infection from the East of Europe. But I say
that bad water made the cattle ready to take it, and made it spread over
the country; and when you are old enough I will give you plenty of
proof--some from the herds of your own kinsmen--that what I say is true.

And as for pure water being life to human beings: why have we never fever
here, and scarcely ever diseases like fever--zymotics, as the doctors
call them? Or, if a case comes into our parish from outside, why does
the fever never spread? For the very same reason that we had no cattle-
plague. Because we have more pure water close to every cottage than we
need. And this I tell you: that the only two outbreaks of deadly disease
which we have had here for thirty years, were both of them, as far as I
could see, to be traced to filthy water having got into the poor folk's
wells. Water, you must remember, just as it is life when pure, is death
when foul. For it can carry, unseen to the eye, and even when it looks
clear and sparkling, and tastes soft and sweet, poisons which have
perhaps killed more human beings than ever were killed in battle. You
have read, perhaps, how the Athenians, when they were dying of the
plague, accused the Lacedaemonians o