I thought you were desperately ill with
smallpox and everybody deserted you, but I went boldly to your bedside and nursed you back to life; and then I took the
smallpox and died and I was buried under those poplar trees in the graveyard and you planted a rosebush by my grave and watered it with your tears; and you never, never forgot the friend of your youth who sacrificed her life for you.
The theory was beautiful--namely, if we kept ourselves soaked in alcohol, every
smallpox germ that came into contact with us would immediately be scorched to a cinder.
"Yes; but there's this difference between love and
smallpox, or bewitchment either--that if you detect the disease at an early stage and try change of air, there is every chance of complete escape without any further development of symptoms.
"I'm glad it isn't
smallpox that ails me, too," she murmured contentedly.
"Then they ought to find out how to vaccinate for love, like
smallpox."
ELIZABETH WILLARD, the mother of George Willard, was tall and gaunt and her face was marked with
smallpox scars.
One was of middle age, with a black beard, but the other was a youth of eighteen, with a face deeply scarred by
smallpox and with one eye only.
While teaching in Mississippi, one of her pupils became ill with
smallpox. Every one in the community was so frightened that no one would nurse the boy.
The pass was crowned with dense, dark forest--deodar, walnut, wild cherry, wild olive, and wild pear, but mostly deodar, which is the Himalayan cedar; and under the shadow of the deodars stood a deserted shrine to Kali--who is Durga, who is Sitala, who is sometimes worshipped against the
smallpox.
The man who escaped
smallpox went down before scarlet fever.
She was but half conscious; she was dying of
smallpox. Here was heroism at its last and loftiest possibility, its utmost summit; this was challenging death in the open field unarmed, with all the odds against the challenger, no reward set upon the contest, and no admiring world in silks and cloth of gold to gaze and applaud; and yet the king's bear- ing was as serenely brave as it had always been in those cheaper contests where knight meets knight in equal fight and clothed in protecting steel.
Arrived in Ecuador, squarely under the equatorial sun, where the humans were dying of yellow fever,
smallpox, and the plague, I promptly drank again-- every drink of every sort that had a kick in it.