In the stern there were about a dozen people sitting. Forward there was a long shapeless bundle lying on a stretcher. It was a case. The others were “contacts,” friends, lodgers, and relations who had lived in the same house with the case. They had come to be isolated for ten days, so that the microbe of the Black Death might show whether or not it was in their blood. They were taken out of the boat first. Their own feelings didn’t matter, for the Black Spectre takes no account of human affections, and permits no other to do so. They were marched away to the quarters set apart for contacts. No farewells were permitted, just a look that might be the last, and that was all. Then the stretcher with the long bundle on it was lifted and carried on to the wharf. Meanwhile the ambulance backed down to the shore-end, the stretcher was put into it, and it drove away up through the trees to the hospital. The next journey of that particular “case” was to the cemetery four days afterwards. When we got back to our floating prison I told the chief engineer what we had seen on shore, and he said in very epigrammatic French: “Quite so! What would you? You are a human being till you take the plague; after that you are an outcast, a thing separate. You live and get better; you die and are buried that’s all.” And, as it happened, the very next day brought an all-too vivid illustration of the truth of this saying. About ten in the morning we heard the “woo-hoo” of the Death Boat’s whistle. There was only one passenger this time, and he travelled in a coffin. A common two-wheeled cart backed down to where the ambulance had been the day before. The coffin was carried to it and put in just like any other sort of packing-case might have been. The driver whipped up his horse, and we watched the cart with its load of coffin, corpse, and quicklime, trotting up the winding road which leads to the burying-ground of North Head. I have seen many funerals in a good many places from Westminster Abbey to Wooloomooloo, but this one was the simplest and the saddest of them all. Away on the other side of the bay, wife and children, brothers and sisters and friends were mourning—and there was the indescribable Thing, which two or three days ago had been a man, being carted away to be dropped into a twelve-foot hole in the ground—buried like a dead dog, because it had died of the Black Death instead of something else. From which you will see that the Black Death has terrors for the living even after it has claimed its dead. Part III _HOMEWARD BOUND_ I “_TWENTY YEARS AFTER_”