I REMEMBER a “cholera year” in a certain big village. The activity of the sanitary authorities (and many and vain had been the efforts to rouse them to activity _before_) was, for them, remarkable. A good many heads of households died with fearful suddenness and not less fearful suffering. Several nuisances were “seen to,” some tar-barrels were burnt, and the scourge passed by. Not long ago a woman, whose home is in a court where some of the most flagrant nuisances existed, in talking to me, casually alluded to one of them. It had been ordered to be removed, she said, in the cholera year when the gentlemen were going round; but the cholera went away, and it remained among those things which were _not_ “seen to,” and for aught I know flourishes still. She was a sensible and affectionate person. Living away from her home at that time, she became anxious at once for the welfare of her relatives if they neglected to write to her. But she had never an anxiety on the subject of that unremedied abomination which was poisoning every breath they drew. That “the gentlemen who went round” felt it superfluous to have their orders carried out when strong men were no longer sickening and dying within two revolutions of the hands of the church clock will surprise no one who has had to do with local sanitary officers. They are like the children of Israel, and will only do their duty under the pressure of a plague. The people themselves are more like the Egyptians. Plagues won’t convince them. A mother with all her own and her neighbors’ children sickening about her would walk miles in a burst shoe to fetch the doctor or a big bottle of medicine, but she won’t walk three yards farther than usual to draw her house-water from the well that the sewer doesn’t leak into. That is a fact, not a fable; and, in the cases I am thinking of, all medical remonstrance was vain. Uneducated people will take any thing in from the doctor through their mouths, but little or nothing through their ears. When such is the state of matters in busy, stirring districts, among shrewd artisans, and when our great seat of learning smells as it does smell under the noses of the professors, it is needless to say that the “black fever” found every household in the little village prepared to contribute to its support, and met with hardly an obstacle on its devastating path. To comment on Master Salter’s qualifications for the post of sanitary inspector would be to insult the reader’s understanding. Of course he owned several of the picturesque little cottages where the refuse had to be pitched out at the back, and the slops chucked out in front, and where the general arrangements for health, comfort, and decency were such as one must forbear to speak of, since, on such matters, our ears—Heaven help us!—have all that delicacy which seems denied to our noses.