Lastly, let him imagine what all this means: what terror walked abroad when it was common for smallpox to strike a family of children, and when the parents, themselves the survivors of similar catastrophes, knew well that before it left the house it would take its tithe of those beloved lives.

Let him look at the brasses in our old churches and among the numbers of children represented on them as kneeling behind their parents; let him note what a large proportion pray with their hands open.

Of these, the most, I believe, were cut off by smallpox.

Let him search the registers, and they will tell the same tale.

Let him ask old people of what their mothers told them when they were young of the working of this pestilence in their youth.