othes, spread the contagion; and, as in all other places,
the attendants and friends who were either blind to their danger, or
heroically despised it, fell a sacrifice to their sympathy. Even the
eyes of the patient were considered a sources of contagion, which had the
power of acting at a distance, whether on account of their unwonted
lustre, or the distortion which they always suffer in plague, or whether
in conformity with an ancient notion, according to which the sight was
considered as the bearer of a demoniacal enchantment. Flight from
infected cities seldom availed the fearful, for the germ of the disease
adhered to them, and they fell sick, remote from assistance, in the
solitude of their country houses.

Thus did the plague spread over England with unexampled rapidity, after
it had first broken out in the county of Dorset, whence it advanced
through the counties of Devon and Somerset, to Bristol, and thence
reached Gloucester, Oxford and London. Probably few places escaped,
perhaps not any; for the annuals of contemporaries report that throughout
the land only a tenth part of the inhabitants remained alive.

From England the contagion was carried by a ship to Bergen, the capital
of Norway, where the plague then broke out in its most frightful form,
with vomiting of blood; and throughout the whole country, spared not more
than a third of the inhabitants. The sailors found no refuge in their
ships; and vessels were often seen driving about on the ocean and
drifting on shore, whose crews had perished to the last man.

In Poland the affected were attacked with spitting blood, and died in a
few days in such vast numbers, that, as it has been affirmed, scarcely a
fourth of the inhabitants were left.

Finally, in Russia the plague appeared two years later than in Southern
Europe; yet here again, with the same symptoms as elsewhere. Russian
contemporaries have recorded that it began with rigor, heat, and darting
pain in the shoulders and back; that it was accompanied by spitting of
blood, and terminated fatally in two, or at most three days. It is not
till the year 1360 that we find buboes mentioned as occurring in the
neck, in the axillae, and in the groins, which are stated to have broken
out when the spitting of blood had continued some time. According to the
experience of Western Europe, however, it cannot be assumed that these
symptoms did not appear at an earlier period.

Thus much, from authentic sour