Mr. and Mrs. Kirby arrived when Bleaburn was at its lowest point of depression and woe. The churchyard was now so full that it could not be made to hold more; and ten or eleven corpses were actually lying unburied, infecting half-a-dozen cottages from this cause. There was an actual want of food in the place—so few were able to earn wages. Farmer Neale did all he could to tempt his neighbours to work for him; for no strangers would come near a place which was regarded as a pesthouse; but the strongest arm had lost its strength; and the men, even those who had not had the fever, said they felt as if they could never work again. The women went on, as habitual knitters do, knitting early and late, almost night and day; but there was no sale. Even if their wares were avouched to have been passed through soap and water before they were brought to O——, still no one would run the slightest risk for the sake of hose and comforters; and week after week, word was sent that nothing was sold: and at last, that it would be better not to send any more knitted goods. In the midst of all this distress, there was no one to speak to the people; no one to keep their minds clear and their hearts steady. For many weeks, there had not been a prayer publicly read, nor a psalm sung. Meanwhile, the great comet appeared nightly, week after week. It seemed as if it would never go away; and there was a general persuasion that the comet was sent for a sign to Bleaburn alone, and not at all for the rest of the earth, or of the universe; and that the fever would not be stayed while the sign remained in the sky. It would have been well if this had been the worst. The people, always rude, were now growing desperate; and they found, as desperate people usually do, an object near at hand to vent their fury upon. They said that it was the doctor’s business to make them well: that he had not made them well: that so many had died, that anybody might see how foul means had been used; and that at last some of the doctor’s tricks had come out. Two of Dick Taylor’s children had been all but choked, by some of the doctor’s physic; and they might have died, if the Good Lady had not chanced to have been there at the moment, and known what to do. And the doctor tried to get off with saying that it was a mistake, and that that physic was never made to go down anybody’s throat. They said, too, that it was only in this doctor’s time that there had been such a fever. There was none such in the late doctor’s time; nor now, in other places—at least, not so bad. It was nothing like so bad at O——. The doctor had spoken lightly of the comet: he had made old Nan Dart burn the bedding that her grandmother left her—the same that so many of her family had died on: and, though he gave her new bedding, it could never be the same to her as the old. But there was no use talking. The doctor was there to make them well; and instead of doing that, he made two out of three die, of those that had the fever.