CONTENTS THE SCARLET PLAGUE I II III IV V VI Illustrations Slowly he Pulled the Bowstring Taut 020 Rabbit is Good, Very Good 026 This Attracted the Old Man's Nostrils 033 With a Sling Such As David Carried 036 I Was a Professor of English Literature 054 Sixty Years Since I Have Seen a Piece of Soap. 059 Granser, You Make Me Sick With Your Gabble 071 But This New Plague Was Quicker 078 The Telephone Bell Rang 088 Fled from the City by Millions 092 I Heard Sounds of Rioting and Of Pistol Shots 098

THE way led along upon what had once been the embankment of a railroad. But no train had run upon it for many years. The forest on either side swelled up the slopes of the embankment and crested across it in a green wave of trees and bushes. The trail was as narrow as a man's body, and was no more than a wild-animal runway. Occasionally, a piece of rusty iron, showing through the forest-mould, advertised that the rail and the ties still remained. In one place, a ten-inch tree, bursting through a

THE old man showed pleasure in being thus called upon. He cleared his throat and began. “Twenty or thirty years ago my story was in great demand. But in these days nobody seems interested—” “There you go!” Hare-Lip cried hotly. “Cut out the funny stuff and talk sensible. What's interested? You talk like a baby that don't know how.” “Let him alone,” Edwin urged, “or he'll get mad and won't talk at all. Skip the funny places. We'll catch on to some of what he tells us.” “Let her go, Granser,” Hoo-

THE old man wiped the tears away on his grimy knuckles and took up the tale in a tremulous, piping voice that soon strengthened as he got the swing of the narrative. “It was in the summer of 2013 that the Plague came. I was twenty-seven years old, and well do I remember it. Wireless despatches—” Hare-Lip spat loudly his disgust, and Granser hastened to make amends. “We talked through the air in those days, thousands and thousands of miles. And the word came of a strange disease that had broken o

I WENT away hastily, down a cross-street, and at the first corner I saw another tragedy. Two men of the working class had caught a man and a woman with two children, and were robbing them. I knew the man by sight, though I had never been introduced to him. He was a poet whose verses I had long admired. Yet I did not go to his help, for at the moment I came upon the scene there was a pistol shot, and I saw him sinking to the ground. The woman screamed, and she was felled with a fist-blow by one o

“FOR two days I sheltered in a pleasant grove where there had been no deaths. In those two days, while badly depressed and believing that my turn would come at any moment, nevertheless I rested and recuperated. So did the pony. And on the third day, putting what small store of tinned provisions I possessed on the pony's back, I started on across a very lonely land. Not a live man, woman, or child, did I encounter, though the dead were everywhere. Food, however, was abundant. The land then was no

“I LIVED three weeks of infinite torment there in the Chauffeur's camp. And then, one day, tiring of me, or of what to him was my bad effect on Vesta, he told me that the year before, wandering through the Contra Costa Hills to the Straits of Carquinez, across the Straits he had seen a smoke. This meant that there were still other human beings, and that for three weeks he had kept this inestimably precious information from me. I departed at once, with my dogs and horses, and journeyed across the