But what do we know of the march of any mysterious form of death that has ever appeared in bygone ages, suddenly starting up and striding over the earth--"the land as a garden of Eden before him, and behind him a desolate wilderness?" We have most of us read of such frightful visitations in Thucydides, in Ovid, in Virgil, in Lucretius, not to mention the moderns; but if any of us were to write down the sum and substance of his knowledge, and attempt to discover from any trustworthy evidence the nature, the course, and the intensity of any great plague that has ever proved a real scourge upon any large section of the human race, what would his summing-up amount to? How long would it take to write; or rather, when it was written, how long would it take to read? This island of Great Britain has more than once been visited by pestilence. De Foe has left us an inimitable romance, which he calls "The History of the Plague in London in 1665." How much or how little of sober fact there may be in those thrilling incidents, worked up so marvellously by the great novelist, it is impossible to say. That there is at least as much of fiction as of fact in the book none can doubt. The author was a child when the plague was raging--a child of two years' old, toddling about the butcher's shop. The plague of 1665 did not travel far; out of London its incidence was comparatively trifling. The cholera has visited us again and again, but never on a scale to demoralize the people at large. Only once in our history has the destroyer passed over England, leaving probably no shire unvisited by his awful presence, and no parish in which there was not one dead. It is never fair to draw inferences from the silence of historians; but it is at least significant that among all contemporary writers who have made mention of the Black Death--as it has been agreed to call it--the Black Death in the reign of Edward III.--there is little mention of any panic, few ugly tales of desertion of the dying, no flagrant instances of miserable creatures crying that the wells were poisoned. On the contrary, we have proof that as a rule men died at their posts during all that trying time, that those in authority never lost their heads, and that though there must, of course, have been isolated cases of abject fear, expressing itself in the maddest extravagances of despair, yet we have to look long and look far and wide to find such cases--and after all our search may be fruitless. As yet the history of the Black Death can hardly be said to have been investigated at all; and until specialists can be prevailed upon to examine the evidence ready at hand, we shall continue to be put off with mere generalities when we ask for more light upon a calamity which was the most stupendous that ever befell this island. * * * * * * *