On the eighteenth of this month news arrived in London that the plague was in France and Italy. These tidings were at first whispered about town; but no one dared express aloud the soul-quailing intelligence. When anyone met a friend in the street, he only cried as he hurried on, “You know!”⁠—while the other, with an ejaculation of fear and horror, would answer⁠—“What will become of us?” At length it was mentioned in the newspapers. The paragraph was inserted in an obscure part: “We regret to state that there can be no longer a doubt of the plague having been introduced at Leghorn, Genoa, and Marseilles.” No word of comment followed; each reader made his own fearful one. We were as a man who hears that his house is burning, and yet hurries through the streets, borne along by a lurking hope of a mistake, till he turns the corner, and sees his sheltering roof enveloped in a flame. Before it had been a rumour; but now in words uneraseable, in definite and undeniable print, the knowledge went forth. Its obscurity of situation rendered it the more conspicuous: the diminutive letters grew gigantic to the bewildered eye of fear: they seemed graven with a pen of iron, impressed by fire, woven in the clouds, stamped on the very front of the universe.