The good ship, with the Bishop and his suite, had hardly got out of the channel, when a storm other than that which sailors care for burst upon town and village in East Anglia. The Bishop's official found his hands full of work. In April he was called upon to institute twenty-three parsons to livings that had fallen vacant. This was bad enough as a beginning, but it was child's play to what followed. By the end of May _seventy-four_ more cures had lost their incumbents and been supplied with successors. That is, in a single month, the number of institutions throughout the diocese had almost equalled the _annual_ average of the last five years. All these stricken parishes were country villages, and the larger number of them lay to the north and east of the county of Norfolk. We take note of this that we call a fact, and straightway the temptation presents itself to construct a theory upon it. Who knows not that in the trying spring-time, the "colic of puff'd Aquilon" makes life hard for man and beast in Norfolk, and that across our fields the cruel gusts burst upon us with a bitter petulance, unsparing, pitiless, hateful, till our vitality seems to be steadily waning? It was in the month of March that the great plague smote us first:--did it not come to us on the wings of the wind that swept across the sea the germs of pestilence, say from Norway, or some neighbour land in which, peradventure, the Black Death had already spent itself in hideous havoc? A tempting theory! If I confess that such a view once presented itself to my own mind I am compelled to acknowledge that I abandoned it with reluctance. It was hard, but it had to be done. How we all do hanker after a theory! What! live all your life without a theory? It's as dreary a prospect as living all your life without a baby, and yet some few great men have managed to pass through life placidly without the one or the other, and have not died forgotten or lived forlorn. The plague had apparently fallen with the greatest virulence upon the coast and along the watercourses, but already in the spring had reached the neighbourhood of Norwich, and was showing an unsparing impartiality in its visitation. At Earlham and Wytton and Horsford, at Taverham and Bramerton, all of them villages within five miles of the cathedral, the parsons had already died. Round the great city, then the second city in England, village was being linked to village closer and closer every day in one ghastly chain of death. What a ring-fence of horror and contagion for all comers and goers to overpass!