All was cleared off, however, when we met again, for Griff’s storms were very fleeting, and Ellen treated him as if she had to make her own peace with him. She sacrificed her own enjoyment of Exeter Cathedral to go about with him when he had had enough of it, but on Sunday afternoon she altogether declined to walk with him till after the second service. He laughed at her supposed passion for sacred music, and offered to wait with her to hear the anthem from the nave. ‘No,’ she said, ‘that would be amusing ourselves instead of worshipping.’ ‘We’ve done our devoir in that way already,’ said Griff. ‘Paid our dues.’ ‘One can’t,’ cried Ellen, with an eager look. ‘One longs to do all the more when He has just let us have such a taste of His beautiful things.’ ‘_One_, perhaps, when one is a little saint,’ returned Griff. ‘Oh don’t, Griff! I’m not _that_; but you know every one wants all the help and blessing that can be got. And then it is so delightful!’ He gave a long whistle. ‘Every one to his taste,’ he said; ‘especially you ladies.’ He did come to the Cathedral with us, but he had more than half spoilt this last Sunday. Did he value her for what was best in her, or was her influence raising him? CHAPTER XXVI. C. MORBUS, ESQ. ‘Forgot were hatred, wrongs, and fears, The plaintive voice alone she hears, Sees but the dying man.’ SCOTT. C. MORBUS, Esq. Such was the card that some wicked wag, one of Clarence’s fellow-clerks probably, left at his lodgings in the course of the epidemic which was beginning its ravages even while we were upon our pleasant journey—a shade indeed to throw out the light. In these days, the tidings of a visitation of cholera are heard with compassion for crowded towns, but without special alarm for ourselves or our friends, since its conditions and the mode of combating it have come to be fairly understood. In 1832, however, it was a disease almost unknown and unprecedented except in its Indian abode, whence it had advanced city by city, seaport by seaport, sweeping down multitudes before it; nor had science yet discovered how to encounter or forestall it. We heard of it in a helpless sort of way, as if it had been the plague or the Black Death, and thought of its victims as doomed. That terrible German engraving, ‘Death as a Foe,’ which represents the grisly form as invading a ballroom in Paris, is an expression of the feeling with which the scourge was regarded on that first occasion. _Two Years Ago_ gives some notion of the condition of things in 1849, but by that time there had been some experience, and means of prevention were better understood. On the alarm in that year there was a great inspection of cottages throughout Earlscombe and Hillside, but in 1832 there was no notion of such precautions. Nevertheless, on neither visitation, nor any subsequent one, has the disease come nearer to us than Bristol.