removed from the
service, and made his name as great a terror to the peculators at
home, as it had been to the enemies of Britain in Hindostan.
Captain Seelencooper, and his associates in the hospital department,
heard and trembled, fearing that their turn should come next; but the
General, who elsewhere examined all with his own eyes, showed a
reluctance to visit the hospital in person. Public report industriously
imputed this to fear of infection. Such was certainly the motive; though
it was not fear for his own safety that influenced General Witherington,
but he dreaded lest he should carry the infection home to the nursery,
on which he doated. The alarm of his lady was yet more unreasonably
sensitive: she would scarcely suffer the children to walk abroad, if the
wind but blew from the quarter where the hospital was situated.
But Providence baffles the precautions of mortals. In a walk across the
fields, chosen as the most sheltered and sequestered, the children, with
their train of Eastern and European attendants, met a woman who carried
a child that was recovering from the small-pox. The anxiety of the
father, joined to some religious scruples on the mother's part, had
postponed inoculation, which was then scarcely come into general use.
The infection caught like a quick-match, and ran like wildfire through
all those in the family who had not previously had the disease.
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