The inhabitants of Berkshire and Bucks had been long aware that the plague was in London, in Liverpool, Bristol, Manchester, York, in short, in all the more populous towns of England.  They were not however the less astonished and dismayed when it appeared among themselves.  They were impatient and angry in the midst of terror.  They would do something to throw off the clinging evil, and, while in action, they fancied that a remedy was applied.  The inhabitants of the smaller towns left their houses, pitched tents in the fields, wandering separate from each other careless of hunger or the sky’s inclemency, while they imagined that they avoided the death-dealing disease.  The farmers and cottagers, on the contrary, struck with the fear of solitude, and madly desirous of medical assistance, flocked into the towns.

But winter was coming, and with winter, hope.  In August, the plague had appeared in the country of England, and during September it made its ravages.  Towards the end of October it dwindled away, and was in some degree replaced by a typhus, of hardly less virulence.  The autumn was warm and rainy:  the infirm and sickly died off—­happier they:  many young people flushed with health and prosperity, made pale by wasting malady, became the inhabitants of the grave.  The crop had failed, the bad corn, and want of foreign wines, added vigour to disease.  Before Christmas half England was under water.  The storms of the last winter were renewed; but the diminished shipping of this year caused us to feel less the tempests of the sea.  The flood and storms did more harm to continental Europe than to us—­giving, as it were, the last blow to the calamities which destroyed it.  In Italy the rivers were unwatched by the diminished peasantry; and, like wild beasts from their lair when the hunters and dogs are afar, did Tiber, Arno, and Po, rush upon and destroy the fertility of the plains.  Whole villages were carried away.  Rome, and Florence, and Pisa were overflowed, and their marble palaces, late mirrored in tranquil streams, had their foundations shaken by their winter-gifted power.  In Germany and Russia the injury was still more momentous.

But frost would come at last, and with it a renewal of our lease of earth.  Frost would blunt the arrows of pestilence, and enchain the furious elements; and the land would in spring throw off her garment of snow, released from her menace of destruction.  It was not until February that the desired signs of winter appeared.  For three days the snow fell, ice stopped the current of the rivers, and the birds flew out from crackling branches of the frost-whitened trees.  On the fourth morning all vanished.  A south-west wind brought up rain—­the sun came out, and mocking the usual laws of nature, seemed even at this early season to burn with solsticial force.  It was no consolation, that with the first winds of March the lanes were filled with violets, the fruit trees covered with blossoms, that the corn sprung up, and the leaves came out, forced by the unseasonable heat.  We feared the balmy air—­we feared the cloudless sky, the flower-covered earth, and delightful woods, for we looked on the fabric of the universe no longer as our dwelling, but our tomb, and the fragrant land smelled to the apprehension of fear like a wide church-yard.