"After a minute she said, 'I have no feet. I am unaware that I have any feet. And my knees are cold. I can scarcely feel that I have knees.

"After a minute she said, 'I have no feet. I am unaware that I have any  feet. And my knees are cold. I can scarcely feel that I have knees.' "She lay on the floor, a bundle of notebooks under her head. And we  could do nothing. The coldness and the numbness crept up past her hips  to her heart, and when it reached her heart she was dead. In fifteen  minutes, by the clock—I timed it—she was dead, there, in my own  classroom, dead. And she was a very beautiful, strong, healthy young  woman. And from the first sign of the plague to her death only fifteen  minutes elapsed. That will show you how swift was the Scarlet Death. "Yet in those few minutes I remained with the dying woman in my  classroom, the alarm had spread over the university; and the students,  by thousands, all of them, had deserted the lecture-room and  laboratories. When I emerged, on my way to make report to the President  of the Faculty, I found the university deserted. Across the campus were  several stragglers hurrying for their homes. Two of them were running. "President Hoag, I found in his office, all alone, looking very old and  very gray, with a multitude of wrinkles in his face that I had never  seen before. At the sight of me, he pulled himself to his feet and  tottered away to the inner office, banging the door after him and  locking it. You see, he knew I had been exposed, and he was afraid.  He shouted to me through the door to go away. I shall never forget  my feelings as I walked down the silent corridors and out across that  deserted campus. I was not afraid. I had been exposed, and I looked  upon myself as already dead. It was not that, but a feeling of awful  depression that impressed me. Everything had stopped. It was like the  end of the world to me—my world. I had been born within sight and sound  of the university. It had been my predestined career. My father had been  a professor there before me, and his father before him. For a century  and a half had this university, like a splendid machine, been running  steadily on. And now, in an instant, it had stopped. It was like seeing  the sacred flame die down on some thrice-sacred altar. I was shocked,  unutterably shocked. "When I arrived home, my housekeeper screamed as I entered, and fled  away. And when I rang, I found the housemaid had likewise fled. I  investigated. In the kitchen I found the cook on the point of departure.  But she screamed, too, and in her haste dropped a suitcase of her  personal belongings and ran out of the house and across the grounds,  still screaming. I can hear her scream to this day. You see, we did not  act in this way when ordinary diseases smote us. We were always calm  over such things, and sent for the doctors and nurses who knew just  what to do. But this was different. It struck so suddenly, and killed so  swiftly, and never missed a stroke. When the scarlet rash appeared on a  person's face, that person was marked by death. There was never a known  case of a recovery. "I was alone in my big house. As I have told you often before, in those  days we could talk with one another over wires or through the air. The  telephone bell rang, and I found my brother talking to me. He told me  that he was not coming home for fear of catching the plague from me, and