Rewards and Fairies - Penn State University

Rudyard Kipling
the Prime Mobile, or source of life (I speak astrologically), is my mind. That plague which I told you I had handled out-
cleansing and purifying in the highest degree. The plague was side Wallingford in Oxfordshire was of a watery nature, con-
hot too by the corn-chandler’s, where they sell forage to the formable to the brookish riverine country it bred in, and cur-
carters, extreme hot in both Mills, along the river, and able, as I have said, by drenching in water. This plague of ours
scatteringly in other places, except, mark you, at the smithy. here, for all that it flourished along watercourses—every soul
Mark here, that all forges and smith shops belong to Mars, at both Mills died of it,—could not be so handled. Which
even as corn and meat and wine shops acknowledge Venus for brought me to a stand. Ahem!’
their mistress. There was no plague in the smithy at Munday’s ‘And your sick people in the meantime?’Puck demanded.
Lane—’
‘We persuaded them on the north side of the street to lie out
‘Munday’s Lane? You mean our village? I thought so when in Hitheram’s field. Where the plague had taken one, or at
you talked about the two Mills,’ cried Dan. ‘Where did we most two, in a house, folk would not shift for fear of thieves
put the plague-stone? I’d like to have seen it.’
in their absence. They cast away their lives to die among their
‘Then look at it now,’ said Puck, and pointed to the chick- goods.’
ens’ drinking-trough where they had set their bicycle lamps. ‘Human nature,’ said Puck. ‘I’ve seen it time and again.
It was a rough, oblong stone pan, rather like a small kitchen How did your sick do in the fields?’
sink, which Phillips, who never wastes anything, had found ‘They died not near so thick as those that kept within doors,
in a ditch and had used for his precious hens.
and even then they died more out of distraction and melan-
‘That?’ said Dan and Una, and stared, and stared, and stared. choly than plague. But I confess, good people, I could not in
Mr Culpeper made impatient noises in his throat and went on. any sort master the sickness, or come at a glimmer of its nature
‘I am at these pains to be particular, good people, because I or governance. To be brief, I was flat bewildered at the brute
would have you follow, so far as you may, the operations of malignity of the disease, and so—did what I should have done
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