When in the midst of and waiting on those who are under the scourge of an epidemic, be as little very close to the patient as you can, and don't inhale his or her breath or exhalations when you can help it; be rather in the current to, than from him. Be very cleanly in putting away all excretions at once, and quite away; go frequently into the fresh air; and don't sleep in your day clothes. Do what the Doctor bids you; don't crowd round your dying friend; you are stealing his life in taking his air, and you are quietly killing yourself. This is one of the worst and most unmanageable of our Scottish habits, and many a time have I cleared the room of all but one, and dared them to enter it. Then you should, in such things as small-pox, as indeed in everything, carry out the Divine injunction, "_Whatsoever_ ye would that men should do unto you, do ye even so to them." Don't send for the minister to pray with and over the body of a patient in fever or delirium, or a child dying of small-pox or malignant scarlet fever; tell him, by all means, and let him pray with you, and for your child. Prayers, you know, are like gravitation, or the light of heaven; they will go from whatever place they are uttered; and if they are real prayers, they go straight and home to the centre, the focus of all things; and you know that poor fellow with the crust of typhus on his lips, and its nonsense on his tongue,--that child tossing in misery, not knowing even its own mother,--what can they know, what heed can they give to the prayer of the minister? He may do all the good he can,--the most good maybe when, like Moses on the hillside, in the battle with Amalek, he uplifts his hands apart. No! a word spoken by your minister to himself and his God, a single sigh for mercy to him who is mercy, a cry of hope, of despair of self, opening into trust in him, may save that child's life, when an angel might pour forth in vain his burning, imploring words into the dull or wild ears of the sufferer, in the vain hope of getting _him_ to pray. I never would allow my father to go to typhus cases; and I don't think they lost anything by it. I have seen him rising in the dark of his room from his knees, and I knew whose case he had been laying at the footstool.