child stood
weeping. When she saw Martin her eyes lighted up with joy.

"Oh, God has sent thee, good brother. Come and help my poor mother.
She is so ill," and she tripped back towards the house; "and father
can't help her, nor brother either. Father lies cold and still, and
brother frightens me."

What did it mean?

Martin saw it at once--the plague! That terrible oriental disease,
probably a malignant form of typhus, bred of foul drainage, and
cultivated as if in some satanic hot bed, until it had reached the
perfection of its deadly growth, by its transmission from bodily
frame to frame. It was terribly infectious, but what then? It had
to be faced, and if one died of it, one died doing God's
work--thought Martin.

So as Hubert faced his Welshmen, did Martin face his foe--"typhus"
or plague, call it which we please.

Which required the greater courage, my younger readers? But there
was no more faltering in Martin's step than in Hubert's, as he went
to that pallet in an inner room, where a human being tossed in all
the heat of fever, and the incessant cry, "I thirst," pierced the
heart.

"So did HE thirst on the Cross," thought Martin, "and He thirsts
again in the suffering members of His mystical body--for in all
their affliction He is afflicted."

There was no water close by in the chamber, but Martin had noticed
a clear spring outside, and taking a cup he went to the fount and
filled it. He administered it sparingly to the parched lips,
fearing its effect in larger quantities, but oh! the eagerness with
which the sufferer received it--those blanched lips, that dry
parched palate.

"Canst thou hear me, art thou conscious?"

"An angel of God?"

"No, a sinner like thyself."

"Go, thou wilt catch the plague."

"I am in God's hands. HE has sent me to thee. Tell me sister--hast
thou thrown thyself upon His mercy, and united thy sufferings with
those of the Slain, the Crucified, who thirsted for thee?"

And Martin spoke of the life of love, and the death of shame, as an
angel might have done, his features lighted up with love and faith.
And the living word was blessed by the Giver of Life.

Then he felt the poor child pulling him gently to another room,
whence faint moans were now heard. There lay the brother, a fine
lad of some fourteen summers, in the death agony, the face black
already; and on another pallet the dead body of the forester, the
father of the family.

Martin could not leave them. Th