soon in a part of the city where death and horror
had left only those whom disease, want of means, or some stringent need,
forbade to leave their homes. Twenty-four thousand then or later fled
the town. A gallant few who could have gone, stayed from a sense of
duty.

Exposure at night was said to be fatal, so that all who could were shut
up indoors, or came out in fear only to feed with pitch and fence
palings the fires kindled in the streets which were supposed to give
protection, but were forbidden later. A canopy of rank tar-smoke hung
over the town and a dull, ruddy glow from these many fires. Grass grew
in the roadway of the once busy street, and strange silence reigned
where men were used to move amid the noises of trade. As he walked on
deep in thought, a woman ran out of a house, crying: "They are dead! All
are dead!" She stopped him. "Is my baby dead, too?"

"I--I do not know," he said, looking at the wasted, yellow face of the
child in her arms. She left it on the pavement, and ran away screaming.
He had never in his life touched the dead; but now, though with
repugnance, he picked up the little body and laid it on a door-step. Was
it really dead? he asked himself. He stood a minute looking at the
corpse; then he touched it. It was unnaturally hot, as are the dead of
this fever. Not seeing well in the dusk, and feeling a strange
responsibility, he laid a hand on the child's heart. It was still. He
moved away swiftly through the gathering gloom of deserted streets. On
Front Street, near Lombard, a man, seeing him approach, ran from him
across the way. A little farther, the sense of solitude and loneliness
grew complete as the night closed dark about him. He had been long on
his way.

A half-naked man ran out of an alley and, standing before him, cried:
"The plague is come upon us because they have numbered the people.
Death! death! you will die for this sin." The young man, thus halted,
stood appalled and then turned to look after the wild prophet of
disaster, who ran up Lombard Street, his sinister cries lost as he
disappeared in the gloom. Rene recalled that somewhere in the Bible he
had read of how a plague had come on the Israelites for having numbered
the people. Long afterward he learned that a census of Philadelphia had
been taken in 1792. He stood still a moment in the gloom, amid the
silence of the deserted city and then of a sudden moved rapidly onward.

He had reached the far edge of the town, hi