gown and gold chain; and then returned to breakfast, and doubtless
transacted their day's business all the better for their morning's
gallop on the breezy downs.

But there was another side to this genial and healthy picture. A
hint that this was a state of society which had its conditions,
its limit; and if those were infringed, woe alike to burgher and
to prentice. Every now and then epidemic disease entered the
jolly city--and then down went strong and weak, rich and poor,
before the invisible and seemingly supernatural arrows of that
angel of death whom they had been pampering unwittingly in every
bedroom.

They fasted, they prayed; but in vain. They called the pestilence
a judgment of God; and they called it by a true name. But they
know not (and who are we to blame them for not knowing?) what it
was that God was judging thereby--foul air, foul water, unclean
backyards, stifling attics, houses hanging over the narrow street
till light and air were alike shut out--that there lay the sin;
and that to amend that was the repentance which God demanded.

Yet we cannot blame them. They showed that the crowded city life
can bring out human nobleness as well as human baseness; that to
be crushed into contact with their fellow-men, forced at least the
loftier and tender souls to know their fellow-men, and therefore
to care for them, to love them, to die for them. Yes--from one
temptation the city life is free, to which the country life is
sadly exposed--that isolation which, self-contented and self-
helping, forgets in its surly independence that man is his
brother's keeper. In cities, on the contrary, we find that the