EPIDEMICS.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3188, 16 September 1881, Page 3

EPIDEMICS.

Many persons (says a -writer in the Globe) in these clays talk of a prevailing epidemic as " the complaint that is going about," as if the disease walked the streets in a bodily form ; but our ancestors actually believed in the living personality of sickness. Weird legends were circulated about the appearance of the plague, as late as the last century living persons professing to have " interviewed " the disease. Their descriptions do not altogether agree. When Edinburgh was visited by the plague in the seventeenth century, several people averred that they had encountered a tall, dark figure, of vague and shapeless outline, fiiting about the streets and houses where the victims to the disease fell thickest. Some had even beheld this mysterious form in the sick rooms, or on the stair-heads, and death always followed the apparition. None had ever beheld his face, and it vanished if approached nearly. One physician, keeping a night-watch by a patient, observed this shadowy form hovering in a dark corner of the apartment, and pursued it down stairs, along several winding streets, into an open space, where it apparently sunk into the ground. On returning to his patient, he found her recovering; and, according to the tradition, the plague began to decline in the city.

At the end of the eighteenth century an old Scotchwoman described the plague as having appeared to her under the form of threads palpable to the eye but not to the touch, which floated into the houses and " cut people's breath. " In 1647 a benevolent warlock is said to have freed Kincerdinshire from the disease. By his spells he succeeded in gathering together these threads and winding them into a ball the size of a man's head. This ball was solemnly hurried, and the plague laid until some unlucky individual should remove the stone and set it free again. Scotland boasts many places where, aecovding to popular tradition, "the plague lies buried. " A spot in Leith Wynd used to be shown as the locality where the plague " had been buried at three o'clock in the morning by MrGusthart, minister, not without praying and other ceremonies—the authority for this statement being an old woman, who had been at school witli Mr Gusthart's granddaughters. At Methven, in Pertshire, there is a legend that some seekers for treasure were bold enough to dii* a spot reputed to be a tomb of the plague ; but before they had proceeded far in their excavations a thick vapor arose and a "low, terrible voice," was heard from the earth. " Let sleeping dogs lie. " The terrified diggers fled afc once, and the plague remained unmolested in its tomb. Several houses in Edinburgh were actually shut up after the last visitation of the plague in that city, and remained undisturbed for a century or longer. The Highland soldiers of Prince Charles Edward in 1745 broke into several of these deserted fcenaments, and found many valuable articles; but an outbreak of the disease followed their temerity. In 1808, some houses were pulled down in Berth's Wynd that had remained closed and uninhabited since the plague in 1645, and persons in the vicinity were apprehensive lest a reappearance of the sickness should follow the disturbance of tho infected places. Happily, these fears proved groundless. Yet in the first cholera epidemic in London many people believed that its appearance was connected with the disturbance of the sites of the old " plague pits," where the victims of 1665 had been interred.

There is a terrible tradition of the " burial of the plague" in Teviotdale. The disease is said to have been introduced into one of the rural villages by a shepherd's wife, who purchased infected finery from a travelling pedlar. Her neighbours, hearing that sha and her children were attacked by the dreadful malady rose in a body, and proceeded to cover up the cottage amd its living inhabitants with a mound, of earth. This terrible sacrifice was accomplished despite tho piteous cries of the victims, whose voices wero heard until five feet of earth was piled over tho cottage. A large mound is still pointed out as the site of this tragedy.