from whom
the State has thus withdrawn its shield, is this writer's excuse for
inviting the public to interest itself in a medical tale. As for the
moral, each reader can fashion it to his fancy.

DOCTOR THERNE

CHAPTER I

THE DILIGENCE

James Therne is not my real name, for why should I publish it to the
world? A year or two ago it was famous--or infamous--enough, but in
that time many things have happened. There has been a war, a continental
revolution, two scandals of world-wide celebrity, one moral and the
other financial, and, to come to events that interest me particularly
as a doctor, an epidemic of Asiatic plague in Italy and France, and,
stranger still, an outbreak of the mediaeval grain sickness, which is
believed to have carried off 20,000 people in Russia and German Poland,
consequent, I have no doubt, upon the wet season and poor rye harvest in
those countries.

These occurrences and others are more than enough to turn the public
mind from the recollection of the appalling smallpox epidemic that
passed over England last autumn two years, of which the first fury broke
upon the city of Dunchester, my native place, that for many years I had
the honour to represent in Parliament. The population of Dunchester, it
is true, is smaller by over five thousand souls, and many of those who
survive are not so good-looking as they were, but the gap is easily
filled and pock-marks are not hereditary. Also, such a horror will
never happen again, for now the law of compulsory vaccination is strong
enough! Only the dead have cause of complaint, those who were cut off
from the world and despatched hot-foot whither we see not. Myself I am
certain of nothing; I know too much about the brain and body to have
much faith in the soul, and I pray to God that I may be right. Ah! there
it comes in. If a God, why not the rest, and who shall say there is no
God? Somehow it seems to me that more than once in my life I have seen
His Finger.

Yet I pray that I am right, for if I am wrong what a welcome awaits me
yonder when grief and chloral and that "slight weakness of the heart"
have done their work.

Yes--five thousand of them or more in Dunchester alone, and, making
every allowance, I suppose that in this one city there were very many of
these--young people mostly--who owed their deaths to me, since it was
my persuasion, my eloquent arguments, working upon the minds of their
prejudiced and credulous elders, that