I am out of breath, what? I wish to stop.

   Arrest yourselves, my friends too impetuous!

   I appeal to you in the name of France, who respects you: do not annihilate me, do not pulverize me. . . . .

   Vain appeal! One would say the car of Juggernaut.

   I am knocked down: I am

    criblé

   with kicks: I am massacred.

   . . . . .

   Ah! . . .

   Thucydides, an Athenian, wrote the history of the epidemic among the Oxonians, how they had the epidemic, having begun to write as soon as it broke out on No. 2 Staircase, and considering it to be the most noticeable of all that had appeared previously. (For the place was not liable to diseases at other times, but especially free from them, except that which affected the teeth: on account of which they used to go up to the metropolis, in word to consult the Delphic oracle but in deed to go to Olympia, so that not a few were banished from the city both for other reasons and not least this.) As to the causes of it, then, let any one speak who is aware of them: but I will show what things happened on account of it, having both myself put on an æger and seen others similarly afflicted, so that I can describe it with equal certainty more than the narrative of another not having done so, but relying on the

   incredibility of historians more than the sureness of experience.

   For in the first beginning of the sickness men remembered what Homer says about the lower and higher animals in the Trojan business—

     First did he assail the mules and fleet dogs, but afterward, aiming at the men his piercing dart, he smote,

   seeing that now too not less but equally as much first, the College Tutors were attacked, and next the scouts, and last of all the men themselves. But most of all the scouts were affected, and this caused the greatest calamity: so that a man must often wish that his scout might recover, wishing indeed contrary to nature, but being persuaded by the greatness of the surrounding misfortune, lest he 

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