THIEVES OF THE NIGHT 



died together. They never knew who would go 

 next, nor in which house the dreaded pestilence 

 would appear. Sometinjes it would sweep 

 down one side of a street and leave the other, 

 then it would visit one house and miss the next. 

 Only of late years have men of science, working 

 in India and other Eastern countries where 

 plague still kUls thousands annually, been able 

 to explain it. They have found out that rats 

 were at the bottom of all the trouble. Not 

 only do rats get plague as badly as people, 

 but it is entirely by means of their fleas that 

 the bubonic plague is spread. All rats have 

 fleas, and when one dies they leave the body 

 as soon as it begins to grow cold, making for 

 the nearest living creature, often a human 

 being. Now in the case of a plague-stricken 

 rat, the fleas, which have been sucking its 

 blood, ^ carry with them the germs of the 

 disease, and when they bite their new host the 

 awful germs of death pass into his blood, 

 where they multiply, and quickly cause a 

 fatal result. 



We can now understand how it was that in 

 the days when the Black Death raged across 



* ' At one meal a single flea can take as many as 5000 plague 

 germs into its stomach.' — Rats and Mice as Enemies of Mankind, by 

 M. A. C. Hinton, 1918. 



185 



