anxiety and avoided one another, walking in the
middle of the roadway. No one shook hands with friend or kinsman. Many
smoked; most of them wore collars of tarred rope, or chewed garlic, or
held to their faces vials of "vinegar of the four thieves" once popular
in the plague. He twice saw men, stricken as they walked, creep away
like animals, beseeching help from those who fled in dismay. Every hour
had its sickening tragedy.

As he stood on Second Street looking at a man chalking the doors of
infected houses, a lightly clad young woman ran forth screaming. He
stopped her. "What is it? Can I help you?" A great impulse of desire to
aid came over him, a feeling of pitiful self-appeal to the manhood of
his courage.

"Let me go! My husband has it. I won't stay! I am too young to die."

A deadly fear fell upon the young Huguenot. "I, too, am young, and may
die," he murmured; but he went in and up-stairs. He saw an old man,
yellow and convulsed; but being powerless to help him, he went out to
find some one.

On the bridge over Dock Creek he met Daniel Offley. He did not esteem
him greatly, but he said, "I want to know how I can help a man I have
just left."

The two men who disliked each other had then and there their lesson. "I
will go with thee." They found the old man dead. As they came out,
Offley said, "Come with me, if thee is minded to aid thy fellows," and
they went on, talking of the agony of the doomed city.

Hearses and push-carts went by in rows, heavy with naked corpses in the
tainted air. Very few well-dressed people were seen. Fashion and wealth
had gone, panic-stricken, and good grass crops could have been cut in
the desolate streets near the Delaware.

Now and then some scared man, walking in the roadway, for few, as I
said, used the sidewalk, would turn, shocked at hearing the Quaker's
loud voice; for, as was noticed, persons who met, spoke softly and low,
as if feeling the nearness of the unseen dead in the houses. While De
Courval waited, Offley went into several alleys on their way, and came
out more quiet.

"I have business here," said Offley, as he led the way over the south
side of the Potter's Field we now call Washington Square. He paused to
pay two black men who were digging wide pits for the fast-coming dead
cast down from the death-carts. A Catholic priest and a Lutheran
clergyman were busy, wearily saying brief prayers over the dead.

Offley looked on, for a minute silent. "The priest