scourge from the colony and mitigate its ravages when it gained an entrance. But it was many years before it occurred to her to tell her husband something of which she made little account, but which seemed to him of immense importance. She said it had long been known that the cows of Gloucestershire were subject to a pustular disease which could be, and sometimes was, communicated to the milkers who had chaps or abrasions of the skin upon their hands. It was believed by some that those persons who had suffered from the cowpox would not have the smallpox, or, if they did, that it would be in a very mild form. She told of a school-teacher who had inoculated several children with the cowpox; these children had escaped the smallpox, even when it attacked their families.
Ralph Morton had one of those fertile minds in which suggestions, falling sterile on other minds, like seeds sown upon the stones of the highway or among the bushes and brambles of the roadside, sprang up in a fruitful growth. He wondered much that if one person had observed that cowpox gave immunity from smallpox, all the world had not soon known and availed itself of the immunity. He did not
