up at me-as she eagerly bent forward towards
the place in which I was sitting. Like a lurk-
ing reptile, it dropped out of sight again-as
she instantly resumed her former position in
the chair.
"You won't trust me?" I said.

No."

"You are afraid ?"

"Do I look as if I was ?"

"You are afraid of Sir Percival Glyde." "Am I ?"

gain for that, when you came here. Go to the church, and inquire about me-you will find Mrs. Catherick has her sitting, like the rest of them, and pays the rent on the day it's due. Go to the town-hall. There's a petition lying there; a petition of the respectable inhabitants against allowing a Circus to come and perform here and corrupt our morals: yes! OUR morals. I signed that petition, this morning. Go to the bookseller's shop. The clergyman's Wednesday evening Lectures on Justification by Faith are publishing there by subscription-I'm down on the list. The doctor's wife only put a shilling in the plate at our last charity sermon-I put half-a-crown. Mr. Churchwarden Soward held the plate, and bowed to me. Ten years ago he "Sir Percival has a high position in the told Pigrum, the chemist, I ought to be whipped world," I said; "it would be no wonder if you out of the town, at the cart's tail. Is your were afraid of him. Sir Percival is a powerful mother alive? Has she got a better Bible on man-a baronet-the possessor of a fine estate her table than I have got on mine? Does she-the descendant of a great familystand better with her tradespeople than I do with mine? Has she always lived within her income? I have always lived within mine.-Ah! there is the clergyman coming along the square. Look, Mr. What's-your-name-look, if you please!"

She started up, with the activity of a young woman; went to the window; waited till the clergyman passed; and bowed to him solemnly. The clergyman ceremoniously raised his hat, and walked on. Mrs. Catherick returned to her chair, and looked at me with a grimmer sarcasm than ever.

"There!" she said. "What do you think of that for a woman with a lost character? How does your speculation look now?"

The singular manner in which she had chosen to assert herself, the extraordinary practical vindication of her position in the town which she had just offered, had so perplexed me, that I listened to her in silent surprise. I was not the less resolved, however, to make another effort to throw her off her guard. If the woman's fierce temper once got beyond her control, and once flamed out on me, she might yet say the words which would put the clue in my hands.

"How does your speculation look now?" she repeated.

Exactly as it looked when I first came in," I answered. "I don't doubt the position you have gained in the town; and I don't wish to assail it, even if I could. I came here because Sir Percival Glyde is, to my certain knowledge, your enemy, as well as mine. If I have a grudge against him, you nave a grudge against him, too. You may deny it, if you like; you may distrust me as much as you please; you may be as angry as you will-but, of all the women in England, you, if you have any sense of injury, are the woman who ought to help me to crush that man."

"Crush him for yourself," she said-"then come back here, and see what I say to you."

She spoke those words, as she had not spoken yet quickly, fiercely, vindictively. I had stirred in its lair the serpent-hatred of years-but only for a moment. Like a lurking reptile, it leapt

Her colour was rising, and her hands were at work again, smoothing her gown. 1 pressed the point farther and farther home-I went on, without allowing her a moment of delay.

She amazed me beyond expression by suddenly bursting out laughing.

Yes," she repeated, in tones of the bitterest, steadiest contempt. "A baronet-the possessor of a fine estate the descendant of a great family. Yes, indeed! A great family—especially by the mother's side.'

There was no time to reflect on the words that had just escaped her; there was only time to feel that they were well worth thinking over the moment I left the house.

"I am not here to dispute with you about family questions," I said. "I know nothing of Sir Percival's mother

"And you know as little of Sir Percival himself," she interposed, sharply.

"I advise you not to be too sure of that," I rejoined. "I know some things about him—and suspect many more."

I

"What do you suspect?"

"I'll tell you what I don't suspect. I don't suspect him of being Anne's father."

She started to her feet, and came close up to me with a look of fury.

"How dare you talk to me about Anne's father! How dare you say who was her father, or who wasn't!" she broke out, her face quivering, her voice trembling with passion.

"The secret between you and Sir Percival is not that secret," I persisted. "The mystery which darkens Sir Percival's life was not born with your daughter's birth, and has not died with your daughter's death."

She drew back a step. pointed sternly to the door.

"Go!" she said, and

"There was no thought of the child in your heart or in his," I went on, determined to press her back to her last defences. "There was no bond of guilty love between you and him, when you held those stolen meetings-when your husband found you whispering together under the vestry of the church."

Her pointing hand instantly dropped to her side, and the deep flush of anger faded from her face while I spoke. I saw the change pass over her; I saw that hard, firm, fearless, self-possessed woman quail under a terror which her

utmost resolution was not strong enough to to her and in my presence-twice in one resist-when I said those five last words, "the vestry of the church."

As I opened the outer door, I saw the same clergyman who had already passed the house once, about to pass it again, on his way back through the square. I waited on the door-step to let him go by, and looked round, as I did so, at the parlour window.

Mrs. Catherick had heard his footsteps approaching, in the silence of that lonely place; and she was on her feet at the window again, waiting for him. Not all the strength of all the terrible passions I had roused in that woman's heart, could loosen her desperate hold on the one fragment of social consideration which years of resolute effort had just dragged within her grasp. There she was again, not a minute after I had left her, placed purposely in a position which made it a matter of common courtesy on the part of the clergyman to bow to her for a second time. He raised his hat, once more. I saw the hard, ghastly face behind the window, soften and light up with gratified pride; I saw the head with the grim black cap bend ceremoniously in return. The clergyman had bowed |

tury, was the first to add to what had previously been written, that a person can have small-pox only once. These Arabian physicians and philosophers represented in their time to Europe the science of the world. They professed that they had for small-pox so extraordinary a remedy that, though nine pustules had come out when it was administered, it would prevent the appearance of a tenth. They generally suffered for their knowledge. Averroes, a portly manywitted man, who could write love-songs as well as study mathematics, was once set by his sovereign bareheaded at the gate of a mosque, where all who entered might spit in his face. In those days it was not altogether to a man's advantage to be well informed.

The first case of small-pox recorded in Europe was that of Elfrida, daughter of Alfred the Great. Elfrida's grandson also died of this disease. Between the eleventh and twelfth centuries, small-pox was spread over Europe by the Crusaders who won for themselves small-pox and leprosy, if they got nothing else, by their adventures in the East. In the reigns of our two first Edwards, small-pox in England was described by Gilbert and by John of Gaddesden, whose reputation Chaucer celebrates. John of Gaddesden, in his "Rosa Anglica," blends poetry with physic. He was a thriving genius, who got "good money from the barber surgeons" for a confection of tree frogs, and he was the first Englishman employed as Court physician. We are told how he treated the king's son when sick of small-pox. It is hard to say whether poetry or physic had inspired him, for his order was that the patient should be wrapped in scarlet, and that everything about the bed should be of a red colour. This, he says, made the prince recover, without having so much as one mark on his face.

were by small-pox; in England, a fourteenth. It was small-pox, said Sir Gilbert Blane, that had blinded two in three of the applicants for relief to the Hospital for the Indigent Blind. Bernoulli believed that this disease swept away fifteen millions of human beings in every quarter of a century. In Europe alone it destroyed in a single century forty-five millions. As all climates were alike to it, so were all ranks. It shattered the constitution of our famous William the Third, destroyed his father, his mother, his wife, his uncle, and his two cousins.

Such were the terrors of the disease concerning which Lady Wortley Montague, wife of our ambassador at Constantinople, wrote in the year seventeen hundred and seventeen, in a letter from Turkey, "The small-pox, so fatal and so general amongst us, is here entirely harmless by the invention of Engrafting, which is the term they give it. Every year thousands undergo the operation, and the French ambassador says pleasantly, that they take the small-pox here by way of diversion, as they take the waters in other countries. There is no example of any one who has died of it, and you may believe I am well satisfied of the safety of this experiment, since I intend to try it on my dear little son. I am patriot enough to take pains to bring this useful invention into fashion in England." Four years afterwards, she had her daughter publicly inoculated in this country. One year after that, preliminary experiments upon six condemned criminals in Newgate having proved satisfactory, two children of Caroline, Princess of Wales, were inoculated. But the new practice met with strong opposition, and in that same year the Reverend Edward Massey preached that Job's distemper was the confluent small-pox, which he took from inoculation by the devil, who thus ranked as the father of inoculators.

The Spaniards took small-pox from Europe to It is a certain truth that the disease of smallAmerica. It depopulated Mexico, by the anni- pox, introduced by puncture through the skin, is hilation of three millions and a half of people; less fatal than the same disease when taken they "perished in heaps," says Prescott. It was, through infection of the air. Where one in five as it always has proved, especially fatal among or six died of the natural disease, there died but the dark-skinned races. A million of people one in fifty-at the Inoculation Hospital only (the whole native population) perished out of three in a thousand-of those upon whom it was Hispaniola by the disease that was more mur- thus engrafted. But to the nation at large derous than war and famine. Still, in the six-inoculation was a scourge. It protected the teenth century, entire races of men were destroyed by it in the Brazils. It spread through Peru, sweeping away all the Indians and mulattoes in the cities of Potosi and De la Paz; it left the country desolate, and the mines were for a long time deserted. In North America, of twelve millions of Red men, six died by the sword, bayonet, and whisky; the other six by smallpox. A translation of the Bible having been made for the Six Nations, by the time it was finished there was not one left to read it, the whole nation having died of small-pox. The terrible disease devastated Siberia, Greenland, and Labrador, and made for three years a silent desert of the capital of Thibet. It killed two millions in a single year in Russia, and at Constantinople it destroyed one half of those on whom it seized. In France and Sweden, a tenth of the deaths

inoculated person at the risk of all his neighbours; for, however mild the course of the disease in his own person, he became, while suffering from it, a centre of infection. Mild cases of small-pox were artificially multiplied among persons, many of whom never would have fallen in the way of natural infection; by these it was communicated naturally to others who would have escaped, and the whole mortality from small-pox which before inoculation had been seventy-four in a thousand, rose to ninety-five in a thousand after the introduction of that practice. Instead of a fourteenth, it became a tenth of the English population that now died of the disease, while the number increased at the same rate of those who recovered with the loss of one or both eyes, with impaired constitutions and disfigured features.

So the matter stood, when Jenner was ap- poor man's family, and that it was impious to prentice to a village doctor, and paid special interfere with the Divine appointment. Ehrmann, heed to the remark of a young country girl, that of Frankfort, quoted the prophets and the faas she had taken a pock from the cows, small- thers of the Church, to prove that the vaccine pox would not hurt her. It had long been matter was Antichrist. A child at Peckham known, in the great dairy farms of Gloucester- was said to have been so changed in nature by shire, that cows were affected with a pustular the introduction into its system of matter taken disease that could be transferred to those who from a cow, that it ran on all-fours, bellowed, and milked them; and that persons by whom this butted. Dr. Rowley published five hundred cases cow-pox had been taken, were unhurt by ex- of the beastly new diseases produced from cowposure to the contagion of small-pox. In pox, in a book illustrated by two coloured enSweden and Holstein, some slight practical gravings of the Cow-poxed, or Ox-faced, Boy. In notice was taken of the same fact while Jenner the sixth year of our century, the present Lord was pondering upon it. In seventeen 'seventy, Lansdowne, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, when he became a pupil of John Hunter, he moved that an inquiry into the state of vaccine spoke of his thought and his great hope to that inoculation should be obtained from the College most eminent of teachers, and Hunter gave his of Physicians. The result was an inquiry by usual advice: "Don't think, but try; be pa- that college, followed by a report affirming the tient, be accurate." This advice Jenner fol- benefits of vaccination in the strongest terms. lowed, and by careful experiment tested his be- Parliament then, in the seventh year of our lief and elaborated the great life-saving truth that century, voted to Jenner, who had given life the matter of cow-pox can be propagated from and fortune to the cause he espoused, thirty one human being to another, and disseminated thousand pounds; and in the eighth year of the over the globe, to the total extinction of small-century the National Vaccine Establishment pox. He was giving up his life to study and for public vaccination and gratuitous supply of toil in this direction. As the first to arrest and matter, or lymph, was founded, with the support also to prove that the benefit of vaccination may of an annual grant of two thousand pounds. be diffused from man to man, and that direct reference in every case to the disease of the cow is not at all necessary for complete protection, he especially acquired the claim he has on the world's gratitude. The horse, the cow, the sheep, the goat, and other animals, are liable to the same pustular disease. In seventeen 'eighty-nine, Jenner inoculated his eldest son with swine-pox matter, and he was afterwards inoculated with small-pox without any result. It has since been found that the disease of these quadrupeds is small-pox itself, modified by the constitution of the animal. It has been observed, like the smallpox in man, in every part of the world. The few pustules on the udders of cows in the Glou-round the world. cestershire dairy farms, Jenner himself observed to have been produced by transfer of the matter on the hands of farm servants from the hoofs of horses affected with what was called the grease.

Jenner's discoveries were well received, only by the best men of his profession. In the first year of this nineteenth century he wrote that upwards of six thousand persons had been vaccinated with success. The practice was then already extending over the globe, and in the next year Jenner thought it "too manifest to admit of controversy, that the annihilation of the small-pox, the most dreadful scourge of the human species, must be the final result of this practice." A parliamentary committee investigated and reported on the new discovery, in terms of most emphatic approbation. A society, called the Royal Jennerian, was formed, with Jenner as its president, for the extermination of small-pox, and opened in London thirteen stations for the vaccination of the public. There were preachers who taught that the disease threatened with extinction had been a merciful gift of Providence for lessening the burden of a

In the mean time, Jenner's essay, which embodied his discovery, had been translated into foreign languages, and had found its way to North America, where President Jefferson, with his own hand and the assistance of his sons-inlaw, vaccinated nearly two hundred of his kindred and his neighbours. In the first year of the century, vaccination was already general in Spain, and two years afterwards the King of Spain fitted out an expedition for the conveyance of the discovery to all Spanish possessions beyond the seas. This expedition, under the conduct of Dr. Francis Xavier Balmis, spent three years in carrying the discovery entirely

In those days various experiments were made in various countries for the inoculation of the cow with human small-pox. Dr. Gassner, of Guntzburg, and Dr. Keile, of Kazan in Russia, succeeded in passing small-pox through the cow, back in vaccine matter to the human system. In Egypt, at a later period, the same was done; but it is Mr. Ceely, of Aylesbury, working, like Jenner, in the midst of the fatigues of practice, who has demonstrated with most patience and success that vaccine matter forming exactly the true cow-pox pustules, is obtained from cows inoculated with our small-pox. It has been observed, indeed, by the Vaccination Committee of the Medical A sociation that the pustules obtained by this matter have a more marked resemblance to the pustules described by Jenner himself than is common in those produced from the matter now in use.

The general result of the adoption of vaccination is, that where one now dies of it in Denmark, eleven used to die; where one now dies of it in Berlin and a large part of Austria, twenty used to die; and in Westphalia, five-and-twenty used to die. Even in the cases where from any par