blessing of the people unto whose cry they had hearkened. Business began to be resumed, and men and women met in the streets and market place without that dread avoidance of contagion which has separated each man from his brothers. A hearty willingness to lend a hand to those who had suffered most was noticeable, even in those professions wherein envy and jealousy are thought to be the only binding links. A thoughtful cheerfulness was the prevailing expression of men's faces; the most frivolous among them was chastened by what he had endured, the most austere softened by the sorrow of the past summer. In the columns of the local press the bulletin of deaths had resumed its normal dimensions, and the marriage notices, which had ceased entirely, began to come slowly into the office. The streets lost their desolate emptiness and the houses assumed their ordinary appearance.
The vengeance of the pauper had been wreaked upon the rich man, and the pestilence was dead, or slept, glutted with its victims. It is as sure as that thunder-clap shall follow lightning-flash that the neglected and squalid denizens of the vile tenements shall breed in their misery and filth a disease which when it has grown strong is not to be stifled in the quarter whence it sprang, but will walk abroad and will not be denied at the doors of the grand houses where the beggar
