“Where wilt thou go, brother?” asked Ben, looking up from a bit of wood carving upon which he was engrossed, with an eager light in his eyes.  Perhaps these two young lads had felt the calamity which had befallen the city more than any one else in the house; for whilst the father, mother, sisters, and two elder sons were all hard at work doing all in their power for the relief of the sick, the younger lads were kept at home, to be as far as possible out of harm’s way, and they had felt the confinement and idleness as most irksome.  Their mother employed them about the house when she could, but it was not much she could find for them to do.  To be sure there was some amusement to be found in watching the life on the river; for though traffic was suspended, many whole families were living on board vessels moored on the river, and hoped by this device to keep the plague away from them.  Yet the time hung very heavy on their hands, and the stories of the increasing ravages of the plague could not but depress them, seeming as they did to lengthen out indefinitely the time of their captivity.

Three of the sisters were practically living away from the house (of which more anon), and the loneliness of the silent house was becoming unbearable.  To lads used to an active life and plenty of exercise, the distemper itself seemed a less evil than this close confinement between four walls.  The bridge houses did not even possess yards or strips of garden, and without venturing out into the streets—­which had for some weeks been forbidden by their father—­the boys could not stir beyond the walls of their home.

August had now come, a close, steaming, sultry August, and the plague was raging with a virulence that threatened to destroy the whole city.  The Bills of Mortality week by week were appalling in magnitude; and yet those who knew best the condition of the lower courts and alleys were well aware that no possible record could be kept of those crowded localities, where whole households and families, even whole streets, were swept away in the course of a few days, and where there were sometimes none left to give warning and notice that there were dead to be borne away.  So the registered deaths could only show a certain proportionate accuracy; for even the dead carts could keep no reckoning of the numbers they bore to the common grave, and the bearers themselves were too often stricken down in the performance of their ghastly duties, and shot by their comrades into the pit amongst those whom they had carried forth an hour before.

It was small wonder that the father had forbidden his younger sons to adventure themselves in the streets, where the pestilence seemed to hang in the very air.  But the magnitude of the peril was beginning to rob even the most cautious persons of any confidence in their methods, for it seemed as if those working hardest amongst the sick and dead were quite as much preserved from peril as those who shunned their neighbours and