Confined in the lazar-house with hundreds of his fellow-sufferers or banished to a lonely hut, far from the haunts of men, the hapless leper dragged out his melancholy existence in pain, in disgrace, in penury. The law declared him civilly dead. With a ceremony not less solemn than that performed over the remains of a Christian actually deceased, the priest announced his final separation from the society of mankind. His body was enveloped in a shroud. He was laid upon a bier. With the repetition of the legal formula which consigned him to a life of odium and sorrow, a few garments and necessary utensils were placed in his hands. He was forbidden to eat with any person but a leper; to wash his hands in running water; to give away any object he had touched; to frequent places of public resort; even to enter the house of a relative or a friend. With his shoulders covered with a tattered scarlet mantle,--a danger-signal, visible from afar,--hideous to the sight, emaciated to a skeleton, and horribly scarred with disease, he crouched by the wayside, sounding his rattle to arouse the compassion and solicit the charity of the passer-by. Deprived of civil rights and debarred from invoking the protection of the law, he was, however, not wholly an outcast, for with the exclusion from these privileges he became the ward and vassal of the Church. So loathed and dreaded was his malady--often considered a divine penalty for crime or sacrilege--that no physician could be induced to employ the scanty medical science of the day for the alleviation of his sufferings; and, even if wealthy, he was abandoned to the suspicious ministrations of wizards, barbers, and charlatans. Shunned as accursed and repulsive during his lifetime, when dead he was unceremoniously buried under the floor of his hovel. The segregation of lepers in the Middle Ages, as a measure of public safety, was productive of singular results in subsequent times. The disease, which at different periods seems to have been both infectious and contagious, gradually disappeared. But the prejudice attaching to the posterity of the unfortunate outcasts, formerly cut off from all intercourse with their fellow-men, and who formed isolated communities, still remained. The origin of that prejudice was completely forgotten. The people in their ignorance attributed the cause of their enmity to religious differences. It was believed that the objects of their unreasoning aversion were variously sprung from the Goths, the Jews, the Saracens, the Albigenses. Modern research, however, has definitely established the fact that the former pariahs of Southwestern Europe, known in Languedoc and Gascony as Capots and Gahets, in Brittany as Cacous, in the Pyrenees as Cagots, in Spain as Agotes, were the descendants of mediæval lepers. A century has hardly elapsed since these victims of popular antipathy have been divested of that suspicion of uncleanness which was their ancient and unhappy heritage.