Defoe wrote only at secondhand about the plague of London (1665), but such symptoms as he gives of that “spotted fever” were probably taken from eye-witnesses with whom he had conversed. He mentions violent pains in the head, vomitings, and spots on the thighs; also “swellings, generally in the neck and groin, which, when they grew hard and would not break, grew so painful that it was equal to the most exquisite torture.... In some these swellings were made hard, partly by the force of the distemper, and partly by their being too violently drawn, and were so hard that no instrument could cut them, and then they burnt them with caustics, so that many died raving mad in the torment, and some in the very operation. In these distresses, some for want of help to hold them down in their beds, or to look to them, laid hands upon themselves. Some broke out into the streets, perhaps naked, and would run directly down to the river, if they were not stopped by the watchman or other officer, and plunge themselves into the water, wherever they found it.” [14] In 1902, nineteen died from this cause at Mulkowal, a village in the Punjab, and the Punjab Government abandoned the hope of inoculation for the time. CHAPTER III THE EXTREMIST I knew it would come. Till I had been some time in Bombay, I did not realize the custom, but the moment I realized it, I felt there was no escape. As often happens with forebodings, it came unexpectedly in the end. I was visiting the simple house, workshop, and garden, in a main street of Poona, where the two Extremist papers are published. Both appear weekly—the _Mahratta_ in English, the _Kesari_ or _Lion_ in the Mahrati language. Both are owned and directed by Mr. Tilak, the acknowledged leader of the Extremists in India, but the _Mahratta_ was edited by Mr. Kelkar, an intellectual, keen-tempered Brahman, who accompanied me over the printing office and showed me a courteous friendliness all through my stay in Poona. Both papers have obtained what is thought a large circulation in India—the _Mahratta_ selling 11,000 a week, the _Kesari_ close upon twice that number. In outward appearance, the _Mahratta_ is very much like the _Spectator_. The _Kesari_, with lions in emblem defiant on each side of the tide, is on cheaper paper of eight folded pages. Its language is said to be more violent than the _Mahratta’s_, which as a rule is carefully moderate in expression.