By the end of May _seventy-four_ more cures had lost
their incumbents and been supplied with successors. That is, in a
single month, the number of institutions throughout the diocese had
almost equalled the _annual_ average of the last five years. All
these stricken parishes were country villages, and the larger number
of them lay to the north and east of the county of Norfolk. We take
note of this that we call a fact, and straightway the temptation
presents itself to construct a theory upon it. Who knows not that in
the trying spring-time, the "colic of puff'd Aquilon" makes life hard
for man and beast in Norfolk, and that across our fields the cruel
gusts burst upon us with a bitter petulance, unsparing, pitiless,
hateful, till our vitality seems to be steadily waning? It was in the
month of March that the great plague smote us first:--did it not come
to us on the wings of the wind that swept across the sea the germs of
pestilence, say from Norway, or some neighbour land in which,
peradventure, the Black Death had already spent itself in hideous
havoc? A tempting theory! If I confess that such a view once
presented itself to my own mind I am compelled to acknowledge that I
abandoned it with reluctance. It was hard, but it had to be done. How
we all do hanker after a theory! What! live all your life without a
theory? It's as dreary a prospect as living all your life without a
baby, and yet some few great men have managed to pass through life
placidly without the one or the other, and have not died forgotten or
lived forlorn.
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