With summer and mortality grew our fears.  My poor love and I looked at each other, and our babes.—­“We will save them, Idris,” I said, “I will save them.  Years hence we shall recount to them our fears, then passed away with their occasion.  Though they only should remain on the earth, still they shall live, nor shall their cheeks become pale nor their sweet voices languish.”  Our eldest in some degree understood the scenes passing around, and at times, he with serious looks questioned me concerning the reason of so vast a desolation.  But he was only ten years old; and the hilarity of youth soon chased unreasonable care from his brow.  Evelyn, a laughing cherub, a gamesome infant, without idea of pain or sorrow, would, shaking back his light curls from his eyes, make the halls re-echo with his merriment, and in a thousand artless ways attract our attention to his play.  Clara, our lovely gentle Clara, was our stay, our solace, our delight.  She made it her task to attend the sick, comfort the sorrowing, assist the aged, and partake the sports and awaken the gaiety of the young.  She flitted through the rooms, like a good spirit, dispatched from the celestial kingdom, to illumine our dark hour with alien splendour.  Gratitude and praise marked where her footsteps had been.  Yet, when she stood in unassuming simplicity before us, playing with our children, or with girlish assiduity performing little kind offices for Idris, one wondered in what fair lineament of her pure loveliness, in what soft tone of her thrilling voice, so much of heroism, sagacity and active goodness resided.

The summer passed tediously, for we trusted that winter would at least check the disease.  That it would vanish altogether was an hope too dear—­ too heartfelt, to be expressed.  When such a thought was heedlessly uttered, the hearers, with a gush of tears and passionate sobs, bore witness how deep their fears were, how small their hopes.  For my own part, my exertions for the public good permitted me to observe more closely than most others, the virulence and extensive ravages of our sightless enemy.  A short month has destroyed a village, and where in May the first person sickened, in June the paths were deformed by unburied corpses—­the houses tenantless, no smoke arising from the chimneys; and the housewife’s clock marked only the hour when death had been triumphant.  From such scenes I have sometimes saved a deserted infant—­sometimes led a young and grieving mother from the lifeless image of her first born, or drawn the sturdy labourer from childish weeping over his extinct family.