the fever next, other cases following under farmer K’s. roof, and thereafter throughout the whole hamlet of Loosebeare[377]. This was doubtless the way the epidemic spread in all the country districts of England, the unwholesome state of labourers’ cottages, as revealed in the reports of the Poor Law Commission, favouring it. In the chapter on the fevers of Ireland we shall find that the contagion of typhus and relapsing fever was dispersed in the same way, but to a much greater extent, owing to the amount of vagrancy. In the manufacturing towns of the North of England the fever continued at a somewhat steady epidemic level for several years. The pathetic scenes of typhus among the poor of Manchester in Mrs Gaskell’s famous tale of _Mary Barton_ belong to the early part of the year 1839; but they might have been drawn from almost any months of the two or three years following, according to the passage cited below from the same work[378]. In 1839 the Lancashire deaths from typhus were 1343; in Wales, Monmouth and Herefordshire they were 1548. There is, indeed, little improvement in the statistical returns as late as 1842. The deaths from “typhus” were as follows in all England and Wales: 1838 1839 1840 1841 1842 18,775 15,666 17,177 14,846 16,201 The deaths from the epidemic maladies of infants and children during the same five years were also very high. 1838 1839 1840 1841 1842 Smallpox 16,268 9,131 10,434 6,368 2,715 Measles 6,514 10,937 9,326 6,894 8,742 Hooping cough 9,107 8,165 6,132 8,099 8,091 Scarlatina 5,802 10,325 19,816 14,161 12,807 Croup 4,463 4,192 4,336 4,177 4,457 Diarrhoea 2,482 2,562 3,469 3,240 5,241 The epidemic of smallpox corresponded closely to the epidemic of fever, the former being fatal chiefly to infants and young children, the latter fatal chiefly to adults. Before the smallpox epidemic had subsided scarlet fever became unusually mortal, especially in 1840, and kept its higher level of deaths for a generation after. The epidemic of fever, although it affected the mortality of the young comparatively little, was indirectly a reason why many of them died of other diseases; for the prostration of the parents, the impoverishment, and all the other troubles associated with an epidemic of typhus, led to inevitable sufferings among the young, which weakened their power of resistance.