connected this most disagreeable phenomenon with the approach of the
pestilence, and, whether they did so rightly or wrongly, the cholera only
too certainly followed upon its heels.

Its first appearance raised feelings of terror in many hearts. I confess
for myself that when I heard that three persons had died of cholera in
the town on the previous day I fell into a small panic; but it was then
that my mother, always a deeply religious woman, seeing how things were
going with us, called her children together, and in the happiest manner
succeeded in converting our dread of an unknown and mysterious evil into
a perfect and childlike trust in the protection of a Heavenly Father.
What she said I cannot now recall; I only know that from that moment,
whilst many of our companions in school and at play went about with
pallid faces and unstrung nerves, all our fears seemed as if by magic to
have vanished. But the reality of the plague was terrible indeed, and the
month of September, 1853, is never likely to be forgotten by anyone who
then lived at Newcastle. It was not merely that the mortality was
enormous, the deaths on some days being above a hundred, but that the
circumstances attending the plague were of a gruesome and harrowing
character. Not a few of the scenes in the streets recalled the story of
the Great Plague of London. We had the same incidents of the dead lying
unburied because there were none left to carry them to the grave. We had
the piles of coffins waiting for interment in the churchyard. We had sad
stories of men seen wheeling the corpse of wife or child in a barrow to
the place of burial. In the evenings workmen carried burning
disinfectants through the streets, the blue flames and sickening stench
of which heightened the horrors of our situation. And perhaps most awful
of all was the suddenness with which the disease slew. One evening in
that terrible month my brothers and I were playing in the garden of our
next-door neighbour with his children; by-and-by he himself came out to