CHAPTER I

THE DILIGENCE

James Therne is not my real name, for why should I publish it to the
world? A year or two ago it was famous--or infamous--enough, but in
that time many things have happened. There has been a war, a continental
revolution, two scandals of world-wide celebrity, one moral and the
other financial, and, to come to events that interest me particularly
as a doctor, an epidemic of Asiatic plague in Italy and France, and,
stranger still, an outbreak of the mediaeval grain sickness, which is
believed to have carried off 20,000 people in Russia and German Poland,
consequent, I have no doubt, upon the wet season and poor rye harvest in
those countries.

These occurrences and others are more than enough to turn the public
mind from the recollection of the appalling smallpox epidemic that
passed over England last autumn two years, of which the first fury broke
upon the city of Dunchester, my native place, that for many years I had
the honour to represent in Parliament. The population of Dunchester, it
is true, is smaller by over five thousand souls, and many of those who
survive are not so good-looking as they were, but the gap is easily
filled and pock-marks are not hereditary. Also, such a horror will
never happen again, for now the law of compulsory vaccination is strong
enough! Only the dead have cause of complaint, those who were cut off
from the world and despatched hot-foot whither we see not. Myself I am
certain of nothing; I know too much about the brain and body to have