The blasphemies and ribald jokes with which this good-for-nothing
young man adorned his speech made it sound tenfold more hideous
than I can do. Even his mother shrank away from him, in terror and
amaze at his levity, and cried aloud in her fear so that instantly
the door opened, and her husband entered to know what was amiss.

Frederick looked a little uneasy then, for he still held his father
in a wholesome awe; but the mother made no complaint of her son,
but only said she had been affrighted by hearing that there were
more deaths from the plague than she had thought would ever be the
case after all the care the Magistrates had taken, and was it true
that the Lord Mayor had spoken of shutting up the houses, and so
causing the sound ones to become diseased and to perish with the
stricken ones?

The Master Builder answered gravely enough; for he had himself but
just come in from hearing that the weekly Bills of Mortality were
terribly high, and that the deaths in certain of the western
parishes had been beyond all reckoning since the last years when
the plague had visited the city. True, there were not many put down
as having died of the plague; but it was known how much was done to
get other diseases set down in the bills, so that there was not
much comfort to be got out of that.

The Master Builder thought that the houses would not be shut up
unless things became much worse. The matter had been spoken of, as
he himself had heard; but the people were much against it, and it
would be a measure most difficult to enforce, and would tend to
make men conceal from the authorities any case of distemper which
appeared amongst them. But he said it was true enough that persons
of high degree were beginning to move into the country, at least
from the western part of the town; but that all felt very sure the
distemper would speedily be checked, and would not come within the
city walls at all, nor extend eastward beyond its boundaries.

Madam breathed a little more freely on hearing this, but made an
eager suggestion to her husband that they should go away if the
distemper began to spread.

But the Master Builder shook his head impatiently.

"A fine thing to run away from a chance ill, and court a certain
ruin! How do you think business will thrive if all the men run away
from their shops like affrighted sheep? No, no; it is often safest
to stay at home with closed doors than to run helter skelter to
strange places where o