sick list with it; by two o'clock on the
succeeding day, there were one hundred and
sixty men laid up. On the same third of April
the disease appeared in London, and on the
evening of that day the regiment on duty at
Portsmouth went to bed all well; but, on the
next morning, there were not soldiers enough
able to get up and do garrison duty. The
influence was upon them.

What this influence is, no man can tell
with certainty. Influenza has more than once
in a curious way preceded cholera, and it is
supposed—incorrectly perhaps—to travel as
cholera does, in a given direction without
being governed by the wind. It is said then to
be connected with the magnetic currents of the
earth. It is said also to depend on the
electrical condition of the air, which becomes
negatively electric, or which causes an
accumulation of electricity in human bodies.
Many of the recorded epidemics of this kind
have been associated with the appearance of
peculiar dry thick fogs. Negatively electric
clouds have been observed before an epidemic
has set in, and thunderstorms. Meat sent up
at the tail of a kite has come down putrid.
The influence has been ascribed also to the
development under certain conditions of vast
clouds of vegetable germs or animalcules,
smaller than the microscopists can detect, as
it is certain that there must exist by myriads
forms of life too minute even for detection by
the best of lenses. A certain animalcule or
a certain fungus coming in contact with the
air passages may be the cause of the peculiar
irritation, and its germs carried about by a
person who has been among them may be
communicated by him—through contact, or
contagion—to his neighbours. So we may
explain the certain fact, that a man coming
by railway from a town in which there is
influenza, not being himself sick, may give
the sickness to the friends with whom he
stays, in a town not otherwise infected.

But of all colds or catarrhs the oddest is
that caused by hay, called the hay asthma.
Happily we are not all apt to catch it. Only
a few people, and they to a marvellous
degree, are sensitive to an influence proceeding
from fresh hay, which begets all the symptoms
of a severe cold, excessive itching and
pinching over the whole mucous membrane,
sneezing, running at the nose, cough, difficulty
of breathing, and so forth. It will affect
people not in an ordinary way liable to catch
cold, will afect them only in the hay season,
and then only if they go near ripe grass or
new hay. Such people, if they can afford it,
fly the country at that time of year, and live
in town, or upon some barren stretch of
coast; there they are safe. A lady liable to
suffer from this influence one day was attacked
suddenly at tea-time, some time after the hay
harvest. Her children had come in to tea
out of a barn full of new hay, in which they
had been playing. The same lady used to go
to Harwich during the hay-making season,
and one day, while walking on the shore there,
she was suddenly attacked. Next morning
she discovered that there was some hay being
made on the top of a cliff, at the time when
she was walking under it. In another year,
she was visiting at another place after the
hay season, and was suddenly attacked, in her
bed-room with the catarrh. It turned out
that a large haystack had been since early
morning in course of removal from a field at
a great distance to a yard close by the house.

Dr. Watson, who is my instructor about all
these things, was called to see the wife of a
stable-keeper near Regent Street. He found
her with a crying cold, alarming difficulty of
breathing, and loud wheezing. Such symptoms
having come on some days before, her
husband had proposed to drive her in a gig
to Islington to see a doctor. They accordingly
had set out, but before they got from Regent
Street to Islington the woman suddenly
became quite well. She had then spent one
or two quiet days and easy nights with some
friends in the City, but directly after she came
home the old symptoms returned upon her.
There was a strong smell of hay in the house,
and the husband stated that his lofts had
lately been filled with a number of fresh
trusses, which were more than usually scented.
It appeared, also, that his wife was always
worse at night when the house was shut up,
and better in the morning when the windows
were all opened and the air blew in. Change
of dwelling was advised. The woman
removed to a house a hundred yards off, and
got well immediately. Then she went into
the country till the scented hay was all used
up. A drier stock having been laid in she
returned, and suffered no more than slight
cough and difficulty of breathing, which did
not distress her. Whatever be the precise
way in which fresh hay exerts its influence,
it appears to be that particular grass which
gives to the hay its scent—called by the
botanists the anthoxanthum odoratum—which
is the source of this extremely curious
disorder.

Now, I am not going on to talk about old
coughs, or old men's and old women's coughs,
because I am an oldish man and you are an
oldish woman, Mrs. Rummer, and we must
not frighten one another. We must nurse
carefully what ugly colds we get, and make
an end of them. Fill me the footpan with
hot water, and dish up the gruel.