know if any of their family has a mind to have the small-pox; they make parties for this purpose, and when they are met (commonly fifteen or sixteen together), the old woman comes with a nut-shell full of the matter of the best sort of small-pox, and asks what veins you please to have opened.  She immediately rips open that you offer to her with a large needle (which gives you no more pain than a common scratch), and puts into the vein as much venom as can lie upon the head of her needle, and after binds up the little wound with a hollow bit of shell; and in this manner opens four or five veins.  The Grecians have commonly the superstition of opening one in the midde of the forehead, in each arm, and on the breast, to mark the sign of the cross; but this has a very ill effect, all these wounds leaving little scars, and is not done by those that are not superstitious, who choose to have them in the legs, or that part of the arm that is concealed.  The children or young patients play together all the rest of the day, and are in perfect health to the eighth.  Then the fever begins to seize them, and they keep their beds two days, very seldom three.  They have very rarely above twenty or thirty in their faces, which never mark; and in eight days’ time they are as well as before their illness.  Where they are wounded, there remain running sores during the distemper, which I don’t doubt is a great relief to it.  Every year thousands undergo this operation; and the French embassador says pleasantly, that they take the small-pox here by way of diversion, as they take the waters in other countries.  There is no example of any one that has died in it; and you may believe I am very well satisfied of the safety of this experiment, since I intend to try it on my dear little son.

“I am patriot enough to take pains to bring this useful invention into fashion in England; and I should not fail to write to some of our doctors very particularly about it, if I knew any one of them that I thought had virtue enough to destroy such a considerable branch of their revenue for the good of mankind.  But that distemper is too beneficial to them not to expose to all their resentment the hardy wight that should undertake to put an end to it.  Perhaps, if I live to return, I may, however, have courage to war with them.  Upon this occasion admire the heroism in the heart of your friend, &c.”

The immediate history of inoculation, so far as Lady Mary is concerned, may here briefly be given.  She first heard of the practice in March, 1717, and within a year her faith in its effect was so strong that in the spring of the following year she had her son inoculated at Pera—­he was the first English person to undergo the operation.  “The boy was engrafted last Tuesday,” she wrote to her husband the following Sunday, “and is at this time singing and playing, and very impatient for his supper....  I cannot engraft the girl; her nurse has not had the small-pox.”  It is