Later on the Demon was more merciful, because he struck harder and killed quicker. In a few weeks it was to be a matter of hours rather than of days. I learnt afterwards that, although the Sanitary Commission had burnt the house down, they had allowed the furniture to be sold by public auction. The same authority permitted the traveller by sea to take any sort of luggage he liked on board the steamer, but would not allow even a package of clean linen to be forwarded from one port to another unless it was in the possession of its owner. Nail it up in a box and it could go, but as personal effects—no. Later on the Demon took his revenge for this foolishness. He laid his hands on the Chief of the Commission, and killed him in thirty-six hours. That night I dined at the club, the Cercle de Noumea, an institution which is devoted to eating and drinking during the day, and to poker and baccarat during the night. There was only one subject of conversation among the Frenchmen round the long table—_la Peste_. During the plague-time in Bombay it cost drinks round to mention the word in white society, but in Noumea every one, doctors and laymen alike, talked unrestrainedly of it. The doctors told of the new “cases,” enlarged on symptoms, and described experiments in detail which made the laymen mostly sick, and nearly all frightened. Which is one point of difference between English and French ways of looking at ugly things. A day or two after, when the name of the Demon had become familiar to my ears, and had, therefore, lost some of its terrors—I suppose I really was quite as frightened as anybody else—I noticed that a man feeling furtively under his armpits was looked at with suspicion, and a man seen limping in the street was left to walk alone. One morning I got up feeling rather seedy. It may have been the mosquitos, or the heat, or the last French cigar overnight. It is a true saying that a man who is his own lawyer has a fool for his client, and that a man who is his own doctor has a still bigger fool for a patient; but by this time I had heard enough of _la Peste_ in Noumea to convince me that I had to take the latter risk into my own hands. If I had described my symptoms to a doctor I should have been “under observation” in the hospital within an hour. After that the date of my coming out would have been a very uncertain one, so I smoked the mosquitos out of my bedroom, took some chlorodyne, and went to bed. It is bad to take opiates, but it is a great deal worse to lie awake in a plague-smitten town and wonder whether or not you’ve got it. The next day I saw a coffin carried out of a house. That night the house was pulled down, and the ruins burnt, but the day after that, as though in mockery of every precaution taken, the Demon showed himself in a new and deadlier form.