Christmas. How, then, if we could not stay here? The question was hard
to answer.

It is, however, a well-recognised fact that epidemics of this kind are
very much under the control of scientific precautions, and as we had good
advice on the spot, no time was lost in stamping out the plague. War is
not made with rose-water (it certainly was not rose-water which reeked
along our passages), and fever germs can be exterminated, it seems, by
nothing less exasperatingly unsavoury than carbolic acid, an agency which
was laid on without any ruth. Grumblers were offered the alternative of
being smoked with sulphur. Some complained of sore throats, contracted,
they said, from the fumes of the disinfectant, and declared that the
remedy, like vaccination, was only a mitigated form of the disorder. The
landlords of our studies looked on with irresolute wonder, when some of
us sprinkled their floors with a potent decoction poured from watering-
pots. Most of them regarded it as a kind of magical rite into which it
would not be seemly to inquire. In one house a practical seaman, late
home from a cruise, took a less reverent view of the lustration, and
uttered hints of what he would do to the perpetrators' heads if their
acid touched his carpets again. Probably the best disinfectant applied
was the clear strong wind, which ten days after the first case succeeded
the previous relaxing weather. All windows and doors were ordered wide
open for the free passage of the blast; and the boys were directed to
bring down their rugs, great-coats, and dressing-gowns, and anything of
the kind which might be supposed to harbour mischief, and spread them for
purification on the pebbles of the beach. It will be believed the scene
was a quaint one, however it might remind the scholar of the idyllic
laundry scene by the Phaeacian shore, where Nausicaa and her maidens:

[Greek verse]