e
graveyards were full, the plague pits, long and deep, were full, and the
dead were taken out to sea by shiploads and there cast into the ocean.
At length even this could not be done, since none were forthcoming
who would dare the task. For it became known that those who did so
themselves would surely die.

So where folk fell, there they lay. In the houses were many of them;
they cumbered and poisoned the streets and the very churches. Even the
animals sickened and perished, until that great city was turned into an
open tomb. The reek of it tainted the air for miles around, so that even
those who passed it in ships far out to sea turned faint and presently
themselves sickened and died. But ere they died they bore on the fatal
gift to other lands.

Moreover, starvation fell upon the place. Though the houses were full of
riches, these would scarce suffice to buy bread for those who remained
alive. The Doge and some of his Council passed laws to lighten the
misery of the people, but soon few heeded these laws which none were
left to enforce. The vagabonds and evil-minded men who began by robbing
the deserted houses of jewels, money and plate, ended by searching them
for food and casting aside their treasures as worthless dross. It was
even said that some of them did worse things, things not to be named,
since in its extremities nature knows no shame. Only if bread and meat
were scarce, wine remained in plenty. In the midst of death men--yes,
and women--who perhaps had deserted their wives, their husbands or their
children, fearing to take the evil from them, made the nights horrible
by their drunken blasphemies and revellings, as sailors sometimes do
upon a sinking ship. Knowing that they must die, they wished to die
merry.

Sir Geoffrey Carleon lived a long while after the death of his wife.
When he passed away at last, ten days or so later, it was painlessly of
the mortification of his broken limb, not of the pest, which went by him
as though it knew that he was already doomed.

All this time Hugh, Grey Dick, and David Day nursed him without ceasing.
Indeed with the exception of a woman so ancient and shrivelled that
nothing seemed able to harm her any more, no one else was left in the
great _palazzo_, for all the rest of the household had perished or fled
away. This woman, who was the grandmother of one of the servants, now
dead of the plague, cooked their food. Of such provision fortunately
there was much lai