Still the sickness spread, and the dead were now counted in hundreds. Of doctors there were but two in the island, and these two were closely engaged sitting by the bedsides of the richer folk, feeling the pulse with one hand and holding the watch with the other. Better service they did not do, for rich and poor alike fell before the sickness. The people turned to the clergy, and got "beautiful texes," but no cure. They went to the old Bishop, and prayed for the same help that he had given them in the old days of their great need. He tried to save them and failed. A preparation of laudanum, which had served him in good stead for the flux, produced no effect on the sweating sickness. With other and other medicines he tried and tried again. His old head was held very low. "My poor people," he said, with a look of shame, "I fear that by reason of the sins of me and mine the Spirit of the Lord is gone from me." Then the people set up a cry as bitter as that which was wrung from them long before when they were in the grip of their hunger. "The Sweat is on us," they groaned; and the old Bishop, that he might not hear their voice of reproach, shut himself up from them like a servant whom the Lord had forsaken. Then terror spread like a fire, but terror in some minds begets a kind of courage, and soon there were those who would no longer join the prayer-meetings in the hay-fields or listen to the preaching on the shore. One of these was a woman of middle life, an idle slattern, who had for six or seven years lived a wandering life. While others prayed she laughed mockingly and protested that for the Sweat as well as for every other scare of life there was no better preventive than to think nothing about it. She carried out her precept by spending her days in the inns, and her nights on the roads, being supported in her dissolute existence by secret means, whereof gossip spoke frequently. The terrified world about her, busy with its loud prayers, took small heed of her blasphemies until the numbers of the slain had risen from hundreds to thousands. Then in their frenzy the people were carried away by superstition, and heard in the woman's laughter the ring of the devil's own ridicule. Somebody chanced to see her early one morning drawing water to bathe her hot forehead, and before night of that day the evil word had passed from mouth to mouth that it was she who had brought the sweating sickness by poisoning the wells. Thereupon half a hundred lusty fellows, with fear in their wild eyes, gathered in the street, and set out to search for the woman. In her accustomed haunt, the "Three Legs of Man," they found her, and she was heavy with drink. They hounded her out of the inn into the road, and there, amid oaths and curses, they tossed her from hand to hand until her dress was in rags, her face and arms were bleeding, and she was screaming in the great fright that had sobered her.