ore or more of sufferers in the great room,
and two nurses moving about amongst them, quickly and in none too
tender a fashion. A doctor was also there with a young man, his
assistant; and at some bedsides he paused, whilst at others he gave
a shake of the head, and went by without a word. Indeed it seemed
to the boys as though almost a quarter of the patients were dead
men, they lay so still and rigid, and the purple patches upon the
white skin stood out with such terrible distinctness.

A man suddenly put in his head from the open door at the other end
and asked of anybody who could answer him:

"Room for any more here?"

And the doctor's assistant, looking round, replied:

"Room for four, if you will send and have these taken away."

Almost immediately there came in two men, who bore away four
corpses from the place, and in five minutes more the beds were full
again, and the nurses were calculating how soon it would be
possible to receive more, some now here being obviously in a dying
state. The bearers reported that the outer barn was full as well as
all the house; but those without invariably died, whilst a portion
of those brought in recovered.

Joseph and Benjamin had seen enough for their own curiosity. It was
a more terrible sight than they had anticipated, and they felt a
great longing to get out of this stricken den into the purer air
without. Joseph had laid a hand on his brother's arm to draw him
away, when he was alarmed by seeing his brother's eyes fixed upon
the far corner of the room with such an extraordinary expression of
amaze and horror, that for a moment he feared he must have been
suddenly stricken by the plague and was going off into the awful
delirium he had heard described.

A poignant fear and remorse seized him, lest he had been the means
of bringing his brother into this peril and having caused his
attack, if indeed it were one, and he pulled him harder by the arm
to get him away. But with a strange choked cry Benjamin broke from
him, and running across the room he flung himself upon his knees by
the side of a bed, crying in a lamentable voice:

"Reuben--Reuben--Reuben!"

It was Joseph's turn now to gaze in horror and dismay. Could that
be Reuben--that cadaverous, death-like creature, with the livid
look of a plague patient, lying like one in a trance which can only
end in the awakening of death? Was Benjamin dreaming? or was it
really their brother? But how could he by any possi