never came abroad unless dire necessity compelled them.  Indeed, despite many deaths of individuals, it began to be noted that the magistrates, aldermen, examiners of health, and nurses of the plague-stricken sickened and died less, in proportion, than almost any other class.  And of the physicians who remained at their posts to tend the sick, not many died, although some few here and there were stricken, and of these a certain proportion succumbed.  But, as a whole, the workers who toiled with a good heart and gentle spirit amongst the sick (not just for daily bread or love of gain) fared better in the prevailing mortality than many others who held themselves aloof and lived in deadly fear of the pestilence.  Wherefore it was not strange that at the last a sort of recklessness was bred amongst the citizens, and they kept themselves less close now when things were in so terrible a pass than they had done when the deaths were fewer and the conditions less fatal.

James Harmer had always been one of those who had put his confidence more in the providence of God than in any merely human precautions, and although he had always insisted upon prudence and care, he had steadily discouraged in his household any of that feeling of panic or of despair which he believed had been a strong factor in the spread of the distemper in its earlier stages.  He also agreed in part with Lady Scrope’s views regarding the water supply of the city—­the old wells and the contaminated river water.  He let nothing be drunk in his house save what was supplied from the New River, and he impressed the same advice upon all his neighbours.

But to return to the boys and their weariness of the shut-up life of the house.  The heat had grown intolerable, their pining after fresh air and liberty was become too strong for resistance.  Benjamin’s eyes glowed at the very thought of escape from the region of streets and shut-up houses, and he drank in the sense of his brother’s words eagerly.

“Hark ye,” cried Joseph, in a rapid undertone, for they did not wish their mother to overhear them, she being by many degrees more fearful than their father, as was but natural, “why should we stay pent up here day after day and week after week, when even the girls be permitted abroad, and go into the very heart of the peril?  We cannot be nurses to the sick, I know right well; neither can we help to search houses, or do such like things, as the elder ones.  But why do we tarry at home eating our hearts out, when the whole world is before us, and there be such wondrous things to see?

“Listen, Ben.  I have a plan.  Let us but once get free of this house, and be our own masters, and we will wander about London as we will, and see those things of which all men be speaking.  I long to look into one of those yawning pits where they shoot the dead, and to see the grass growing in the city, and to hear some of those strange preachers who go about prophesying in the streets.  I long for liberty and freedom.  I would sooner die of the plague at last than fret my heart out shut up here.  And we may be smitten as well at home as abroad, as even father says himself.”