h me.' Mr. Culpeper
tapped his thin chest. 'I dressed a whitlow on his thumb. So we went
forward.

'Not to trouble you with impertinences, we fetched over against Jack
Marget's parish in a storm of rain about the day's end. Here our roads
divided, for I would have gone on to my cousin at Great Wigsell, but
while Jack was pointing me out his steeple, we saw a man lying drunk, as
he conceived, athwart the road. He said it would be one Hebden, a
parishioner, and till then a man of good life; and he accused himself
bitterly for an unfaithful shepherd, that had left his flock to follow
princes. But I saw it was the plague, and not the beginnings of it
neither. They had set out the plague-stone, and the man's head lay on
it.'

'What's a plague-stone?' Dan whispered.

'When the plague is so hot in a village that the neighbours shut the
roads against 'em, people set a hollowed stone, pot, or pan, where such
as would purchase victual from outside may lay money and the paper of
their wants, and depart. Those that would sell come later--what will a
man not do for gain?--snatch the money forth, and leave in exchange such
goods as their conscience reckons fair value. I saw a silver groat in
the water, and the man's list of what he would buy was rain-pulped in
his wet hand.

'"My wife! Oh, my wife and babes!" says Jack of a sudden, and makes
up-hill--I with him.

'A woman peers out from behind a barn, crying out that the village is
stricken with the plague, and that for our lives' sake we must avoid it.

'"Sweetheart!" says Jack. "Must I avoid thee?" and she leaps at him and
says the babes are safe. She was his wife.

'When he had thanked God, even to tears, he tells me this was not the
welcome he had intended, and presses me to flee the place while I was
clean.

'"Nay! The Lord do so to me and more also if I desert thee now," I said.
"These affairs are, under God's leave, in some fashion my strength."

'"Oh, sir," she says, "are you a physician? We have none."

'"Then, good people," said I, "I must e'en justify myself to you by my
works."

'"Look--look ye," stammers Jack, "I took you all this time for a crazy
Roundhead preacher." He laughs, and she, and then I--all three together
in the rain are overtook by an unreasonable gust or clap of laughter,
which none the less eased us. We call it in medicine the Hysterical
Passion. So I went home with 'em.'

'Why did you not go on to your cousin at Great Wigsell, Nick?' Puck