The winter of 1657-8 had been, according to Evelyn, the severest winter that any man alive had known in England. “The crowes feete were frozen to their prey, Islands of ice inclos’d both fish and fowl frozen....” It was on Christmas Day that Mr. and Mrs. Evelyn went into London to receive the Communion in Exeter Chapel, and that the Chapel was surrounded by soldiers and the communicants surprised and taken prisoners—the soldiers’ muskets pointed at them as they knelt before the Altar. The Evelyns were allowed to go home; and a month after this memorable Communion, in January 1658, they lost their little prodigy of an eldest son—just five years old—who died of a quartan ague. “Such a child I never saw: For such a child I blesse God in whose bosome he is!” He was buried in Deptford Church; and a week or two later their youngest child followed him, “after 7 weeks languishing at nurse, breeding teeth, and ending in a dropsie.” The season was still very cold and sickly, and in May a public Fast was ordered “to avert an epidemical sicknesse, very mortal this Spring.” But in spite of the Fast, June came in with an extraordinary storm of hail and rain, “the season as cold as winter, the wind Northerly nere 6 moneths.” It may have been in consequence of this epidemic, following on an unhealthy winter, that Hartlib was even more than usually curious about the ingredients of certain _arcana_—or medical “secrets” as he always called them. He mentioned one, in particular, in a letter to Robert Boyle, dated February 2, 1658. Hartlib himself had been a sufferer from the “extremity of the frosty weather.” It appears from Hartlib’s letter to Boyle that Mr. Milton had in his possession a “secret” which Hartlib, and apparently Boyle also, was at this time anxious to obtain. “I shall not be wanting,” wrote Hartlib to Boyle, “to obtain that secret which hath been imparted to Mr. Milton. It may be the public gentleman, that sent it unto him, will let me have a copy, in case the other should not come off readily with the communication of it. But if yours[225] would ask it from Mr. Milton, I am confident he would not deny it.” If by “yours” Hartlib meant Lady Ranelagh, that lady was still in Ireland, on difficult domestic business of her own, and far away from the garden-house in Petty France; and Dick Jones and Henry Oldenburg were on their “peregrination” abroad. Whether or no Mr. Milton was induced to part with his prescription remains unrelated. Hartlib’s letter to Boyle was written on February 2, and only a few days later Milton’s second wife died—the baby girl she had borne him in October was to live on into March. That spring, in his darkness and solitude, Milton’s mind was turning once more to his scheme of a _Paradise Lost_. It was not exactly a time for Mr. Hartlib to trouble him about a prescription.