The Scarlet Plague. Джек Лондон

about getting food. And the more food there was, the more people there were. In the year 1800, there were one hundred and seventy millions in Europe alone. One hundred years later – a grain of sand, Hoo-Hoo – one hundred years later, at 1900, there were five hundred millions in Europe – five grains of sand, Hoo-Hoo, and this one tooth. This shows how easy was the getting of food, and how men increased. And in the year 2000 there were fifteen hundred millions in Europe. And it was the same all over the rest of the world. Eight crab-shells there, yes, eight billion people were alive on the earth when the Scarlet Death began.

      “I was a young man when the Plague came – twenty-seven years old; and I lived on the other side of San Francisco Bay, in Berkeley. You remember those great stone houses, Edwin, when we came down the hills from Contra Costa? That was where I lived, in those stone houses. I was a professor of English literature.”

      Much of this was over the heads of the boys, but they strove to comprehend dimly this tale of the past.

      “What was them stone houses for?” Hare-Lip queried.