all wonder that the father had forbidden his younger sons
to adventure themselves in the streets, where the pestilence seemed
to hang in the very air. But the magnitude of the peril was
beginning to rob even the most cautious persons of any confidence
in their methods, for it seemed as if those working hardest amongst
the sick and dead were quite as much preserved from peril as those
who shunned their neighbours and never came abroad unless dire
necessity compelled them. Indeed, despite many deaths of
individuals, it began to be noted that the magistrates, aldermen,
examiners of health, and nurses of the plague-stricken sickened and
died less, in proportion, than almost any other class. And of the
physicians who remained at their posts to tend the sick, not many
died, although some few here and there were stricken, and of these
a certain proportion succumbed. But, as a whole, the workers who
toiled with a good heart and gentle spirit amongst the sick (not
just for daily bread or love of gain) fared better in the
prevailing mortality than many others who held themselves aloof and
lived in deadly fear of the pestilence. Wherefore it was not
strange that at the last a sort of recklessness was bred amongst
the citizens, and they kept themselves less close now when things
were in so terrible a pass than they had done when the deaths were
fewer and the conditions less fatal.

James Harmer had always been one of those who had put his
confidence more in the providence of God than in any merely human
precautions, and although he had always insisted upon prudence and
care, he had steadily discouraged in his household any of that
feeling of panic or of despair which he believed had been a strong
factor in the spread of the distemper in its earlier stages. He
also agreed in part with Lady Scrope's views regarding the water
supply of the city--the old wells and the contaminated river water.
He let nothing be drunk in his house save what was supplied from
the New River, and he impressed the same advice upon all his
neighbours.

But to return to the boys and their weariness of the shut-up life
of the house. The heat had grown intolerable, their pining after
fresh air and liberty was become too strong for resistance.
Benjamin's eyes glowed at the very thought of escape from the
region of streets and shut-up houses, and he drank in the sense of
his brother's words eagerly.

"Hark ye," cried Joseph, in a rapid undertone, for they di