What happened at the great Abbey of St. Edmund's we know not yet, and
until we get more light it is idle to conjecture but, as a man stands
in that vast graveyard at Bury, and looks around him, he can hardly
help trying--trying, but failing--to imagine what the place must have
looked like when the plague was raging. What a Valley of Hinnom it
must have been! Those three mighty churches, all within a stone's
throw of one another, and one of them just one hundred feet longer
than the cathedral at Norwich, sumptuous with costly offerings, and
miracles of splendour within--and outside ghastly heaps of
corruption, and piles of corpses waiting their turn to be covered up
with an inch or two of earth. Who can adequately realize the horrors
of that awful summer? In the desolate swamps through which the
sluggish Bure crawls reluctantly to mingle its waters with the Yare;
by the banks of the Waveney where the little Bungay nunnery had been
a refuge for the widow, the forsaken, or the devout for centuries; in
the valley of the Nar--the Norfolk Holy Land--where seven monasteries
of one sort or another clustered, each distant from the other but a
few short miles--among the ooze and sedge and chill loneliness of the
Broads, where the tall reeds wave and whisper, and all else is
silent--the glorious buildings with their sumptuous churches were
little better than centres of contagion.
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