did. The first sight of this respectable couple, middle-aged, business

like, and somewhat dry in their manner, tended to give sobriety to the tone of mind of the Bleaburn people; a sobriety which was more and more wanted from day to day; while certainly the aspect of Bleaburn was enough to discourage the new residents, let their expectations have been as dismal as they might.

Mr. and Mrs. Kirby arrived when Bleaburn was at its lowest point of depression and woe. The churchyard was now so full that it could not be made to hold more; and ten or eleven corpses were actually lying unburied, infecting half-a-dozen cottages from this cause. There was an actual want of food in the place—so few were able to earn wages. Farmer Neale did all he could to tempt his neighbours to work for him; for no strangers would come near a place which was regarded as a pesthouse; but the strongest arm had lost its strength; and the men, even those who had not had the fever, said they felt as if they could never work again. The women went on, as habitual knitters do, knitting early and late, almost night and day; but there was no sale. Even if their wares were avouched to have been passed through soap and water before they were brought to O——, still no one would run the slightest risk for the sake of hose and comforters; and week after week, word was sent that nothing was sold: and at last, that it would be better not to send any more knitted goods. In the midst of all this distress, there was no one to speak to the people; no one to keep their minds clear and their hearts steady. For many weeks, there had not been a prayer publicly read, nor a psalm sung. Meanwhile, the great comet appeared nightly, week after week. It seemed as if it would never go away; and there was a general persuasion that the comet was sent for a sign to Bleaburn alone, and not at all for the rest of the earth, or of the universe; and that the fever would not be stayed while the sign remained in the sky. It would have been well if this had been the worst. The people, always rude, were now growing desperate; and they found, as desperate people usually do, an object near at hand to vent their fury upon. They said that it was the doctor’s business to make them well: that he had not made them well: that so many had died, that anybody might see how foul means had been used; and that at last some of the doctor’s tricks had come out. Two of Dick Taylor’s children had been all but choked, by some of the doctor’s physic; and they might have died, if the Good Lady had not chanced to have been there at the moment, and known what to do. And the doctor tried to get off with saying that it was a mistake, and that that physic was never made to go down anybody’s throat. They said, too, that it was only in this doctor’s time that there had been such a fever. There was none such in the late doctor’s time; nor now, in other places—at least, not so bad. It was nothing like so bad at O——. The doctor had spoken lightly of the comet: he had made old Nan Dart burn the bedding that her grandmother left her—the same that so many of her family had died on: and, though he gave her new bedding, it could never be the same to her as the old. But there was no use talking. The doctor was there to make them well; and instead of doing that, he made two out of three die, of those that had the fever. Such grumblings broke out into storm; and when Mr. and Mrs. Kirby descended into the hollow which their friends feared would be their tomb, they found the whole remaining population of the place blocking up the street before the doctor’s house, and smashing his phials, and making a pile of his pill-boxes and little drawers, as they were handed out of his surgery window. A woman had brought a candle at the moment to fire the pill-boxes: and she kneeled down to apply the flame. The people had already broken bottles enough to spill a good deal of queer stuff; and some of this stuff was so queer as to blaze up, half as high as the houses, as quick as thought. The flame ran along the ground, and spread like magic. The people fled, supposing this the doings of the comet and the doctor together. Off they went, up and down, and into the houses whose doors were open. But the woman’s clothes were on fire. She would have run too; but Mr. Kirby caught her arm, and his firm grasp made her stand, while Mrs. Kirby wrapped her camlet cloak about the part that was on fire. It was so quickly done—in such a moment of time, that the poor creature was not much burned; not at all dangerously; and the new pastor was at once informed of the character of the charge he had undertaken.

That very evening Warrender was sent through the village, as crier, to give a notice, to which every ear was open. Mr. Kirby having had medical assurance that it was injurious to the public health that more funerals should take place in the churchyard, and that the bodies should lie unburied, would next day, bury the dead above the brow, on a part of Furzy Knoll, selected for the purpose. For anything unusual about this proceeding, Mr. Kirby would be answerable, considering the present state of the village of Bleaburn. A waggon would pass through the village at six o’clock the next morning; and all who had a coffin in their houses were requested to bring it out, for solemn conveyance to the new burial ground: and those who wished to attend the interment must be on the ground at eight o’clock.

All ears were open again the next morning, when the cart made its slow progress down the street; and some went out to see. It was starlight: and from the east came enough of dawn to show how the vehicle looked with the pall thrown over it. Now and then, as it passed a space between the houses, a puff of wind blew aside the edge of the pall, and then the coffins were seen within, ranged one upon another,—quite a load of them. It stopped for a minute at the bottom of the street; and it was a relief to the listeners to hear Warrender tell the driver that there were no more, and that he might proceed up to the brow. After watching the progress of the cart till it could no longer be distinguished from the wall of grey rock along which it was ascending, those who could be spared from tending the sick put on such black as they could muster, to go to the service.

It was, happily, a fine morning;—as fine a November morning as could be seen. It is not often that weather is of so much consequence as it was to the people of Bleaburn to-day. They could not themselves have told how it was that they came down from the awful service at Furzy Knoll so much more light-hearted than they went up; and when some of them were asked the reason, by those who remained below, they could not explain it,—but, somehow, everything looked brighter. It was, in fact, not merely the calm sunshine on the hills, and the quiet shadows in the hollows; it was not merely the ruddy tinge of the autumn ferns on the slopes, or the lively hop and flit of the wag-tail about the spring-heads and the stones in the pool; it was not merely that the fine morning yielded cheering influences like these, but that it enabled many, who would have been kept below by rain, to hear what their new pastor had to say. After going through the burial service very quietly, and waiting with a cheerful countenance while the business of lowering so many coffins by so few hands was effected, he addressed, in a plain and conversational style, those who were present. He told them that he had never before witnessed an interment like this; and he did not at all suppose that either he or they should see such another. Indeed, henceforth any funerals must take place without delay; as they very well might, now that, on this beautiful spot, there was room without limit. He told them how Farmer Neale had had the space they saw staked out since yesterday, and how it would be fenced in—roughly, perhaps, but securely—before night. He hoped and believed the worst of the sickness was over. The cold weather was coming on; and, perhaps, he said with a smile, it might be a comfort to some of them to know that the comet was going away. He could not say for himself that he should not be sorry when it disappeared; for he thought it a very beautiful sight, and one which reminded every eye that saw it how ‘the heavens declare the glory of God;’ and the wisest men were all agreed that it was a sign,—not of any mischief, but of the beauty of God’s handiwork in the firmament, as the Scriptures call the starry sky. The fact was, it was found that comets come round regularly, like some of the other stars and our own moon; and when a comet had once been seen, people of a future time would know when to look for it again, and would be too wise to be afraid of it. But he had better tell them about such things at another time, when perhaps they would let their children come up to his house, and look through a telescope,—a glass that magnified things so much, that when they saw the stars, they would hardly believe they were the same stars that they saw every clear night. Perhaps they might then think the commonest star as wonderful as any comet. Another reason why they might hope for better health was, that people at a distance now knew more of the distress of Bleaburn than they had done; and he could assure his neighbours, that supplies of nourishing food and wholesome clothing would be lodged with the cordon till the people of the place could once more earn their own living. Another reason why they might hope for better health was, that they were learning by experience what was good for health and what was bad. This was a very serious and important subject, on which he would speak to them again and again, on Sundays and at all times, till he had shown them what he thought about their having, he might almost say, their lives and health in their own hands. He was sure that God had ordered it so; and he expected to be able to prove to them, by and by, that there need be no fever in Bleaburn if they chose to prevent it. And now, about these Sundays and week days. He deeply pitied them that they had been cut off from worship during their time of distress. He thought there might be an end to that now. He would not advise their assembling in the church. There were the same reasons against it that there were two months ago; but there was no place on earth where men might not worship God, if they wished it. If it were now the middle of summer, he should say that the spot they were standing on,—even yet so fresh and so sunny,—was the best they could have; but soon the winter winds would blow, and the cold rains would come driving over the hills. This would not do: but there was a warm nook in the hollow,—the crag behind the mill,—where there was shelter from the east and north, and the warmest sunshine ever felt in the hollow,—too hot in summer, but very pleasant now. There he proposed to read prayers three times a week, at an hour which should be arranged according to the convenience of the greatest number; and there he would perform service and preach a sermon on Sundays, when the weather permitted. He should have been inclined to ask Farmer Neale for one of his barns, or to propose to meet even in his kitchen; but he found his neighbours still feared that meeting anywhere but in the open air would spread the fever. He did not himself believe that one person gave the fever to another; but as long as his neighbours thought so, he would not ask them to do what might make them afraid. Then there was a settling what hours should be appointed for worship at the crag; and the mourners came trooping down into the hollow, with brightened eyes, and freshened faces, and altogether much less like mourners than when they went up.

Before night, Mr. Kirby had visited every sick person in the place, in company with the doctor. The poor doctor would hardly have ventured to go his round without the assistance of some novelty that might divert the attention of the people from his atrocities. Mr. Kirby did not attempt to get rid of the subject. He told the discontented, to their faces, that the doctor knew his business better than they did; and bade them remember that it was not the doctor but themselves that had set fire to spirits of wine, or something of that sort, in the middle of the street, whereby a woman was in imminent danger of being burnt to death; and that their outrage on the good fame and property of a gentleman who had worn himself half dead with fatigue and anxiety on their account might yet cost them very dear, if it were not understood that they were so oppressed with sorrow and want that they did not know what they were about. His consultations with the doctor from house to house, and his evident deference to him in regard to matters of health and sickness, wrought a great change in a few hours; and the effect was prodigiously increased when Mrs. Kirby, herself a surgeon’s daughter, and no stranger in a surgery, offered her daily assistance in making up the medicines, and administering such as might be misused by those who could not read the labels.

“That is what the Good Lady does, when she can get out at the right time,” observed some one; “but now poor Jem is down, and his mother hardly up again yet, it is not every day, as she says, that she can go so far out of call.”

“Who is this Good Lady?” inquired Mr. Kirby. “I have been hardly twenty-four hours in this place, and I seem to have heard her name fifty times; and yet nobody seems able to say who she is.”

“She almost overpowers their faculties, I believe,” replied the doctor; “and, indeed, it is not very easy to look upon her as upon any other young lady. It comes easier to one’s tongue to call her an angel than to introduce her as Miss Mary Pickard, from America.”

When he had told what he knew of her, the Kirbys said, in the same breath,

“Let us go and see her.” And the doctor showed them the way to Widow Johnson’s, where poor Jem was languishing, in that state which is so affecting to witness, when he who has no intellect seems to have more power of patience than he who has most. The visitors arrived at a critical moment, however, when poor Jem’s distress was very great, and his mother’s hardly less. There lay the Good Lady on the ground, doubled up in a strange sort of way; Mrs. Johnson trying to go to her, but unable; and Jem, on his bed in the closet within, crying because something was clearly the matter.

“What’s to do now?” exclaimed the doctor.

Mary laughed as she answered, “O nothing, but that I can’t get up. I don’t know how I fell, and I can’t get up. But it is mere fatigue—want of sleep. Do convince Aunty that I have not got the fever.”

“Let’s see,” said the doctor. Then, after a short study of his new patient, he assured Mrs. Johnson that he saw no signs of fever about her niece. She had had enough of nursing for the present, and now she must have rest.

“That is just it,” said Mary. “If somebody will put something under me here, and just let me sleep for a few days, I shall do very well.”

“Not there, Miss Pickard,” said Mrs. Kirby, “you must be brought to our house, where everything will be quiet about you; and then you may sleep on till Christmas, if you will.”

Mary felt the kindness; but she evidently preferred remaining where she was; and, with due consideration, she was indulged. She did not wish to be carried through the street, so that the people might see that the Good Lady was down at last; and besides, she felt as if she should die by the way, though really believing she should do very well if only let alone. She was allowed to order things just as she liked. A mattress was put under her, on the floor. Ann Warrender came and undressed her, lifting her limbs as if she was an infant, for she could not move them herself; and daily was she refreshed, as she had taught others to refresh those who cannot move from their beds. Every morning the doctor came, and agreed with her that there was nothing in the world the matter with her; that she had only to lie still till she felt the wish to get up; and every day came Mrs. Kirby to take a look at her, if her eyes were closed: and if she was able to talk and listen, to tell her how the sick were faring, and what were the prospects of Bleaburn. After these visits, something good was often found near the pillow; some firm jelly, or particularly pure arrow-root, or the like; odd things to be dropped by the fairies; but Mrs. Kirby said the neighbours liked to think that the Good Lady was waited on by the Good People.

Another odd thing was, that for several days Mary could not sleep at all. She would have liked it, and she needed it extremely, and the window curtain was drawn, and everybody was very quiet, and even poor Jem caught the trick of quietness, and lay immoveable for hours, when the door of his closet was open, watching to see her sleep. But she could not. She felt, what was indeed true, that Aunty’s large black eyes were for ever fixed upon her; and she could not but be aware that the matter of the very first public concern in Bleaburn was, that she should go to sleep; and this was enough to prevent it. At last, when people were getting frightened, and even the doctor told Mr. Kirby that he should be glad to correct this insomnolence, the news went softly along the street one day, told in whispers even at the further end, that the Good Lady was asleep. The children were warned that they must keep within doors, or go up to the brow to play; there must be no noise in the hollow. The dogs were not allowed to bark, nor the ducks to quack; and Farmer Neale’s carts were, on no account, to go below the Plough and Harrow. The patience of all persons who liked to make a noise was tried and proved, for nobody broke the rule; and when Mary once began sleeping, it seemed as if she would never stop. She could hardly keep awake to eat, or to be washed; and, as for having her hair brushed, that is always drowsy work, and she could never look before her for two minutes together while it was done. She thought it all very ridiculous, and laughed at her own laziness, and then, before the smile was off her lips, she had sunk on her pillow and was asleep again.