It was a different picture on the bright river when that brig entered the
harbor on the return of her last voyage, to receive how different a
welcome! But pestilence raged abroad in the country now, and the people of
the port, who had so far escaped the evil, were loth to let it enter among
them at last, and had not yet recovered from the recoil of their first
shock and shiver at thought of it in their waters--waters than which none
could have fostered it more kindly, full as they were in their shallow
breadth of rotting weeds and the slime of sewers. Perhaps the owner of
some pale face looked through the pane and thought of brother or father,
or, it may be, of lover, and grew paler with pity, and longed to do kind
offices for those who suffered; but the greater part of all the people
hived upon the shores would have scouted the thought of going out with aid
to those hot pillows rocking there upon the tide, and of bringing back
infection to the town, as much as though the act had been piracy on the
high seas. And they stayed at home, and watched their vanes and longed for
an east wind--an east wind whose wings would shake out healing, whose
breath would lay the destroying fever low; but the east wind refused to
seek their shores, and chose rather to keep up its wild salt play far out
on the bosom of its mid-sea billows.
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