And such indeed might this place be called.  Roger was fearfully right in his prediction.  Each house entered showed its number of victims to the destroyer, but not one of these victims was living to receive comfort or help from the ministrations of those who had come amongst them.  And not man alone had suffered; upon the dumb beasts too had the scourge fallen:  for when Roger suddenly bethought him that the creatures would want tendance in the absence of their owners, and had gone to the sheds to seek for them, nothing but death met his eye on all sides.  Some in their stalls, some in the open fields, some, like their masters, beside the stream, lay the poor beasts all stone dead.

It seemed as if the scourge had fallen with peculiar virulence upon this little hamlet, in the warm cup-like hollow where it lay, and had smitten it root and branch.  Possibly the waters of the stream had been poisoned higher up, and the deadly malaria had reached it in that way; possibly some condition of the atmosphere predisposed living things to take the infection.  But be the cause what it might, there was no gainsaying the fact.  Not a living or breathing thing remained in the hamlet; and little as Raymond knew it, such wholesale destruction was only too common throughout the length and breadth of England.  But such a revelation coming upon him suddenly, brought before his very eyes when he had come with the desire to help and tend the living, filled him with an awe that was almost terror, although the terror was not for himself.  Personally he had no fear; he had given himself to this work, and he would hold to it be the result what it might.  But the thought of the scourge sweeping down upon a peaceful hamlet, and carrying off in a few short days every breathing thing within its limits, was indeed both terrible and pitiful.  He could picture only too vividly the terror, the anguish, the agony of the poor helpless people, and longed, not to escape from such scenes, but rather to go forward to other places ere the work of destruction had been accomplished, and be with the sick when the last call came.  If he had been but two days earlier in coming forward, might he not have been in time to do a work of mercy and charity even here?

But it was useless musing thus.  To act, and not to think, was now the order of the day.  He went slowly out from the yard they had last visited, his face as pale as death, but full of courage and high purpose.

“There is nothing living here,” he said, as he reached the Father, who had not left the side of the dead.  “We have been into all the houses, we have looked everywhere, but there is nothing but dead corpses:  man and beast have perished alike.  Nothing that breathes is left alive.”

The Father looked round upon the scene of smiling desolation —­ the sunny harvest fields, the laughing brook, the broad meadows —­ and the ghastly rows of plague-stricken corpses at his feet, and a stern, sad change passed across his face.