If the infection spread, it might be
difficult to find hospital room; to communicate it to the villagers, as
might easily befall, would be an unhappy return for their own ready
hospitality; and then how miserable to have fled from sickness at
Uppingham, and find it had followed us to Borth, as if, like the haunted
family of the poem, "we had packed the thing among the beds." Already
there came news which raised unspoken doubts of our returning home after
Christmas. How, then, if we could not stay here? The question was hard
to answer.
It is, however, a well-recognised fact that epidemics of this kind are
very much under the control of scientific precautions, and as we had good
advice on the spot, no time was lost in stamping out the plague. War is
not made with rose-water (it certainly was not rose-water which reeked
along our passages), and fever germs can be exterminated, it seems, by
nothing less exasperatingly unsavoury than carbolic acid, an agency which
was laid on without any ruth. Grumblers were offered the alternative of
being smoked with sulphur.
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