e chickens'
drinking-trough where they had set their bicycle lamps. It was a rough,
oblong stone pan, rather like a small kitchen sink, which Phillips,
who never wastes anything, had found in a ditch and had used for his
precious hens.

'That?' said Dan and Una, and stared, and stared, and stared. Mr
Culpeper made impatient noises in his throat and went on.

'I am at these pains to be particular, good people, because I would have
you follow, so far as you may, the operations of my mind. That plague
which I told you I had handled outside Wallingford in Oxfordshire was
of a watery nature, conformable to the brookish riverine country it bred
in, and curable, as I have said, by drenching in water. This plague of
ours here, for all that it flourished along watercourses--every soul at
both Mills died of it,--could not be so handled. Which brought me to a
stand. Ahem!'

'And your sick people in the meantime?'Puck demanded. 'We persuaded them
on the north side of the street to lie out in Hitheram's field. Where
the plague had taken one, or at most two, in a house, folk would not
shift for fear of thieves in their absence. They cast away their lives
to die among their goods.'

'Human nature,' said Puck. 'I've seen it time and again. How did your
sick do in the fields?'

'They died not near so thick as those that kept within doors, and even
then they died more out of distraction and melancholy than plague. But
I confess, good people, I could not in any sort master the sickness, or
come at a glimmer of its nature or governance. To be brief, I was flat
bewildered at the brute malignity of the disease, and so--did what I
should have done before--dismissed all conjectures and apprehensions
that had grown up within me, chose a good hour by my Almanac, clapped
my vinegar-cloth to my face, and entered some empty houses, resigned to
wait upon the stars for guidance.'

'At night? Were you not horribly frightened?' said Puck.

'I dared to hope that the God who hath made man so nobly curious to
search out His mysteries might not destroy a devout seeker. In due
time--there's a time, as I have said, for everything under the sun--I
spied a whitish rat, very puffed and scabby, which sat beneath the
dormer of an attic through which shined our Lady the Moon. Whilst I
looked on him--and her--she was moving towards old cold Saturn, her
ancient ally--the rat creeped languishingly into her light, and there,
before my eyes, died. Presently hi