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HOME > Children's Novel > Jan of the Windmill A Story of the Plains > CHAPTER XXV.
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CHAPTER XXV.
 SANITARY INSPECTORS.—THE PESTILENCE.—THE PARSON.—THE DOCTOR.—THE SQUIRE AND THE SCHOOLMASTER.—DESOLATION AT THE WINDMILL.—THE SECOND ADVENT.  
I remember a “cholera year” in a certain big village.  The activity of the sanitary authorities (and many and vain had been the efforts to rouse them to activity before) was, for them, remarkable.  A good many heads of households died with fearful suddenness and not less fearful suffering.  Several nuisances were “seen to,” some tar-barrels were burnt, and the scourge passed by.  Not long ago a woman, whose home is in a court where some of the most flagrant nuisances existed, in talking to me, casually alluded to one of them.  It had been ordered to be removed, she said, in the cholera year when the gentlemen were going round; but the cholera went away, and it remained among those things which were not “seen to,” and for aught I know flourishes still.  She was a sensible and affectionate person.  Living away from her home at that time, she became anxious at once for the welfare of her relatives if they neglected to write to her.  But she had never an anxiety on the subject of that unremedied abomination which was poisoning every breath they drew.  That “the gentlemen who went round” felt it superfluous to have their orders carried out when strong men were no longer sickening and dying within two revolutions of the hands of the church clock will surprise no one who has had to do with local sanitary officers.  They are like the children of Israel, and will only do their duty under the pressure of a plague.  The people themselves are more like the Egyptians.  Plagues won’t convince them.  A mother with all her own and her neighbors’ children sickening about her would walk miles in a burst shoe to fetch the doctor or a big bottle of medicine, but she won’t walk three yards farther than usual to draw her house-water from the well that the sewer doesn’t leak into.  That is a fact, not a fable; and, in the cases I am thinking of, all medical remonstrance was vain.  Uneducated people will take any thing in from the doctor through their mouths, but little or nothing through their ears.
 
When such is the state of matters in busy, stirring districts, among shrewd artisans, and when our great seat of learning smells as it does smell under the noses of the professors, it is needless to say that the “black fever” found every household in the little village prepared to contribute to its support, and met with hardly an obstacle on its devastating path.
 
To comment on Master Salter’s qualifications for the post of sanitary inspector would be to insult the reader’s understanding.  Of course he owned several of the picturesque little cottages where the refuse had to be pitched out at the back, and the slops chucked out in front, and where the general arrangements for health, comfort, and decency were such as one must forbear to speak of, since, on such matters, our ears—Heaven help us!—have all that delicacy which seems denied to our noses.
 
If the causes of the calamity were little understood, portents were plentifully noted.  The previous winter had been mild.  A thunderbolt fell in the autumn.  There was a blight on the gooseberries, and Master Salter had a calf with two heads.  As to the painter, a screech-owl had been heard to cry from his chimney-top, not three weeks before his death.
 
There was a pause of a day or so after Master Linseed died, and then victims fell thick and fast.  Children playing happily with their mimic boats on the open drain that ran lazily under the noontide sun, by the footpath of the main street, were coffined for their hasty burial before the sun had next reached his meridian.  The tears were hardly dry in their parents’ eyes before these also were closed in their last sleep.  The very aged seemed to linger on, but strong men sickened and died; and at the end of the week more than one woman was left sitting by an empty hearth, a worn-out creature whom Death seemed only to have forgotten to take away.
 
At first there was a reckless disregard of infection among the neighbors.  But, after one or two of these family desolations, this was succeeded by a panic, and even the noble charity which the poor commonly show to each other’s troubles failed, and no one could be got to nurse the sick or bury the dead.
 
Now the Rector was an old man.  Most of the parish officers were aged, and patriarchs in white smock frocks were as plentiful as creepers at the cottage doors.  The healthy breezes and the dull pace at which life passed in the district seemed to make men slow to wear out.  If the Rector had profited by these features of the parish in health, it must be confessed that they had also had their influence on his career.  He was a good man, and a learned one.  He stuck close to his living, and he was benevolent.  But he was not of those heroic natures who can resist the influence of the mental atmosphere around them; and in a dull parish, in a sleepy age, he had not been an active parson.  Some men, however, who cannot make opportunities for themselves, can do nobly enough if the chance comes to them; and this chance came to the Rector in his sixty-ninth year, on the wings of the black fever.  To quicken spiritual life in the soul of a Master Salter he had not the courage even to attempt; but a panic of physical cowardice had not a temptation for him.  And so it came about that of four men who stayed the panic, by the example of their own courage, who went from house to house, and from sick-bed to sick-bed—who drew a cordon round the parish, and established kitchens and a temporary hospital, and nursed the sick, and encouraged the living, and buried the dead,—the most active was the old Rector.
 
The other three were the parish doctor, Squire Ammaby, and the schoolmaster.
 
On the very first rumor of the epidemic, Lady Louisa had carried off Amabel, and had gone with Lady Craikshaw to Brighton.  Both the ladies were indignant with the Squire’s obstinate resolve to remain amongst his tenants.  In her alarm, Lady Louisa implored him to sell the property and buy one in Ireland, which was Lady Craikshaw’s native country; and the list she contrived to run up of the drawbacks to the Ammaby estate would have driven a temper less stolid than her husband’s to distraction.
 
When the fever broke out among the children, the schools were closed, and Master Swift devoted his whole time to laboring with the parson, the doctor, and the Squire.
 
No part of the Rector’s devotion won more affectionate gratitude from his people than a single act of thoughtfulness, by which he preserved a record of the graves of their dead.  He had held firmly on to a decent and reverent burial, and, foreseeing that the poor survivors would be quite unable to afford gravestones, he............
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