4o6 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



who was not then conscious of any sickness upon them, settled with 

 him for his entertainment, intending to start on his journey at day- 

 break, and went to bed. The next morning, rising and wanting some- 

 thing from those with whom they had supped, the travelers could make 

 no one hear. Then they learned from an old woman whom they found 

 in bed that the host, his two daughters and servant had died in the 

 night. "In the spring of 1348 a Genoese, infected with the plague, 

 came to Piacenza. He sought out his friend, Fulchino della Croce, who 

 took him into his house. Almost immediately afterward he died, and 

 the said Fulchino was also quickly carried ofE with his entire family 

 and many of his neighbors." "The bishop of Eochester out of his 

 small household lost four priests, five gentlemen, ten serving men, 

 seven young clerks and six pages, so that not a person remained who 

 might serve him in any oflfiee." "Alas, for our sorrow ! This mortality 

 swept away so vast a multitude of both sexes that none could be found 

 to carry the corpses to the grave. Men and women bore their own 

 offspring on their shoulders to the church and cast them into a com- 

 mon pit." "And I, Agniolo di Tura, carried with my own hands my 

 five little sons to the pit." 



Everywhere through Europe the story is the same. The sudden 

 onset, the four or five months of devastation, the glutting of the old 

 cemeteries and the opening up of new, the pits into which the bodies 

 were piled, the extermination of whole families, the collapse of govern- 

 ment, the desertion of the sick and the dead, the avoidance of the 

 infected, the occasional heroism, self-sacrifice, devotion to duty, and 

 the sadly more frequent selfishness, cruelty, callousness and reckless- 

 ness; then the passing away of the visitation, leaving behind it, often, 

 according to the bewildered judgment of the contemporary chronicler, 

 not a tenth part of the people, and even according to modern and 

 moderate computation seldom as many as one-half of the population 

 it had found. 



Then came the gleaning. Physical disease then as always brought 

 moral degeneracy. A great catastrophe then as always weakened the 

 virtues and strengthened the vices of poor custom-bound humanity. 

 A physician at Avignon writes: "The father did not visit his son, nor 

 the son his father. Charity was dead." Villani says of his neighbors 

 at Florence that they behaved as "might perhaps be expected from 

 infidels and savages." "Men gave themselves up to the enjoyment of 

 the worldly riches to which they had succeeded." The English manor 

 court rolls record more than one case where a house bereft of its 

 occupants by the plague was plundered by the neighbors, and bodies of 

 the dead stripped by their own fellow villagers. The wealthy, in the 

 months following the plague, gambled, reveled, steeped themselves in 

 gluttony and lechery; the poor idled, brawled, took advantage of the 



