“Oh! you shall know all about it: but first we must arrange the parts. You, Pat, shall be the thief, and I will be the judge—no, you shall be the judge and I the thief!” He was interrupted by a burst of laughter.
“Be quiet, will you?—who’ll be the policeman?”
“I! I!” cried several of the children, eager to join in the proposed play.
“Now, Sam, you shall be the fat landlady,”—there was another roar of merriment, louder than before;—“for you must know that the thief is to get drunk; that’s how he is to be taken by the policeman; and he staggers here and there,”—Bat began to imitate the unsteady movements of an intoxicated man, amid the renewed mirth of the children;—“and when they seize him he calls out a great oath—you shall hear it all just as I heard it.”
“I hope not,” said Thorn, very quietly, raising his eyes from his book. The boys were quiet in a moment: they had almost forgotten the presence of their teacher.
“Why, sir, do you think that there is any harm?” said Bat Nayland: “it does not make us thieves to have a little fun about them.”
“It lessens your horror for their crime; and remember the words in the Bible, _Fools make a mock at sin_. Can you imagine any true child of God laughing at theft, drunkenness, and swearing?”
“This is one cause, I believe, why penny theatres are one of the most fruitful sources of vice and ruin to those who attend them. Wickedness, instead of appearing hateful as it does in God’s Word, is made amusing, and even sometimes attractive; and those who willingly place themselves in the way of being corrupted by such sights, only mock the Holy One when they pray, _Lead us not into temptation_.
“But,” continued the teacher in a more cheerful tone, “if I have stopped your amusement in one way, it is but fair that I should contribute to it in another. I hear the rain still pattering without—what would you say to my telling you a story?”
“A story! a story!” repeated the scholars, forming in a little circle around their teacher; for where are the children to be found upon earth on whom that word does not act like a spell!
“It is now long, long ago,” commenced Thorn, “nearly two hundred years, since the fearful plague raged in London. Nothing which we have witnessed in these happier days can give an idea of the horrors of that time. It is said that nearly seventy thousand people perished of this awful malady—some authors make the number even ninety thousand! The nearest relatives were afraid of each other. When an unfortunate being showed symptoms that the disease had seized him—the swelling under the arms, the pain in the throat, the black spots, which were signs of the plague—his very servants fled from him in terror; and unless some one was found to help the sufferer from love even stronger than fear of death, he was left to perish alone; for the plague was fearfully infectious. When a door was marked with a cross, the sign that the fearful scourge had entered the house, it was shunned by all but the driver of the dead-cart—that gloomy conveyance which moved slowly through the silent streets to carry away the bodies of those who had sunk beneath the terrible disease!”