smoke his evening pipe, and as usual he had a kindly word for each one of
us. We left him, when we went to bed, sauntering in the placid eventide
among the flowers he was wont carefully to tend. When I got downstairs
next morning a rough country servant, who was then in our employment,
bluntly told me that "that laddie B----" (naming our neighbour) had died
of the cholera during the night.

It is easy to conceive the effect which an incident like this necessarily
had upon the mind of a child; and there were many such incidents. I
verily believe that if we had not been clad by our mother's care and
wisdom in that armour of trusting faith, we should have suffered
irremediable injury. As it was, it became apparent that we must be
removed from the plague-stricken town. But whither could we go? No
visitor from Newcastle or any other riverside town could find admittance
into any of the lodging-houses on the coast. Happily a port of refuge was
open to us in the little blacksmith's cottage at Whitley, and thither, to
our great relief, we were transported about the time when the virulence
of the epidemic began to abate. My father had himself suffered from an
attack of the disease, probably incurred whilst visiting, with quiet but
unstinted devotion, the sick, and I also had had a very slight touch of
it. The fine air of Whitley and the sunny hours spent on the lonely sands
did wonders for us all; and when we returned home it was to find
Newcastle restored to its ordinary life, with only the empty places in
many households to remind us of the ordeal through which the town had
passed.

I have spoken of the resemblance between this outbreak of cholera and the
Great Plague of London. Curiously enough, the likeness between the
experiences of the northern town in the nineteenth century and the
capital in the seventeenth was to be made yet closer. It was just a year