In the year 1348 that terrible contagion, known as the Black Death, which journeyed from the East to devastate the whole of Europe, appeared at Strasburg.[129] Everywhere famine, floods, the inversion of the seasons, strange appearances in the sky, had been its precursors. In the Mediterranean Sea, as afterwards in the Baltic, ships were descried drifting masterless, filled only by plague-stricken corpses. Every man dreaded, not merely the touch and the breath of his neighbour, but his very eye, so subtile and so swift seemed the infection. In many parts of France it was computed that only two out of every twenty inhabitants were left alive. In Strasburg sixteen thousand perished; in Avignon sixty thousand. In Paris, at one time, four or five hundred were dying in a day. In that city, in the midst of a demoralization and a selfish horror like that Thucydides has painted, the Sisters of Mercy were seen tending the sufferers who crowded the Hôtel-Dieu; and, as death thinned their martyr-ranks, numbers more were ready to fill the same office of perilous compassion. Pausanias says that in Athens alone out of all Greece there was raised an altar to mercy. But it was an altar almost without a ministry. Heathendom, at its best, might glory in the shrine; Christianity, at its worst, could furnish the priesthood. In Strasburg Tauler laboured fearlessly, with Thomas and Ludolph, among the panic-stricken people—doubly cursed by the Interdict and by the plague. Great fires of vine-wood, wormwood, and laurel were kept burning in the squares and market-places to purify the air, lighting up the carved work of the deserted town-hall, and flickering aslant the overhanging gables of the narrow crooked streets and the empty tradesmen’s stalls. The village was ravaged as fatally as the town. The herds grew wild in the fields of the dead peasants, or died strangely themselves—victims, apparently, to the universal blight of life. The charlatans of the day drove for awhile a golden traffic with quintessences and distillations, filthy and fantastic medicines, fumigation of shirts and kerchiefs, charms and invocations, only at last to perish in their turn. Even the monks had lost their love for gold, since every gift was deadly. In vain did trembling men carry their hoards to the monastery or the church. Every gate was barred, and the wealthy might be seen tossing their bags of bezants over the convent walls. In the outskirts of towns and cities, huge pits were opened, whose mouths were daily filled with hideous heaps of dead. The pope found it necessary to consecrate the river Rhone, and hundreds of corpses were cast out at Avignon, from the quays and pleasant gardens by the water-side, to be swept by the rapid stream under the silent bridges, past the