All whom death mows down, the people lay to my charge.

Wherever one looks--corpses! Whatever one hears--curses! Have I authority over so many lives?
Day and night nothing but sorrow and death before my eyes;--and yet, yet, yet--oh God! save me from madness!" Peter clasped both hands over his brow; but Bontius found no word of comfort, and merely exclaimed: "And I, and I?
My wife and child ill with a fever, day and night on my feet, not to cure, but to see people die.
What has been learned by hard study becomes childish folly in these days, and yet the poor creatures utter a sigh of hope when I feel their pulses.

But this can't go on, this can't go on.

Day before yesterday seventy, yesterday eighty-six deaths, and among them two of my colleagues." "And no prospect of improvement ?" "To-morrow the ninety will become a hundred--the one hundred will become two, three, four, five, until at last one individual will be left, for whom there will be no grave-digger." "The pest-houses are closed, and we still have cattle and horses." "But the pestilence creeps through the joints, and since the last loaf of bread and the last malt-cake have been divided, and there is nothing for the people to eat except meat, meat, and nothing else--one tiny piece for the whole day--disease is piled on disease in forms utterly unprecedented, of which no book speaks, for which no remedy has yet been discovered.

This drawing water with a bottomless pitcher is beginning to be too much for me.