They went on to talk of the Laureate, and Cyril was surprised and pleased by the justice of the cobbler’s criticism. Emmanuel was touched by the curate’s forbearance. He expressed himself warmly when Cyril was taking leave of him. ‘You are a man in a thousand,’ he said. ‘You are not liberal in words only, but in acts. One would suppose that in your eyes I should be an outcast--a Pariah--Anathema Maranatha.’ ‘You are a man,’ answered Cyril, ‘and your soul is precious in my esteem.’ Now came dark days for the pestiferous slums and putrescent lanes which surrounded and hemmed in the high street and market-place of Bridford, like a foul network of brick and mortar, shutting out the fresh sweet breezes that sweep over wood and pasture, moor and corn-field, and all the spicy summer odours of wild herbs and flowers. Mysteriously, scarce anyone knowing where the rumour first began, there arose the cry that cholera was in Bridford. People stood at the street corners, and on the door-steps, telling one another of this fatal visitant, with awe-stricken faces and hushed voices. They were accustomed to small-pox, they were but too familiar with typhus and typhoid, which two fatal diseases the great Jenner was just then seeking to differentiate. But cholera was a foe that came but seldom, and when he came was scathing as that dark angel of the Lord before whose burning breath the host of Sennacherib melted like snow. They had had cholera in the fatal year of ’32. It had revisited them in ’47--and now, stricken with an awful dread, they clustered in little groups at the street corners, at the baker’s, at the close little dingy shops that sold everything, and in which the atmosphere was pervaded with subtly blended odours of cheese, blacking, pickled onions, chicory, lucifer matches, candles, bacon, firewood, and red herrings. There was a general exodus of all the well-to-do people of Bridford. They packed their trunks in a feverish hurry, and carried their children off to the sea, whereby all the accessible watering-places were sorely overcrowded, and a fertile crop of typhus and scarlatina was grown in close lodgings and sewer-scented bedchambers; so much so that it was afterwards asserted that those who stayed at home, and faced the perils of cholera, and did a good deal to help their poorer neighbours, fared better than those more cautious spirits who fled before the face of the foe.