经典！《喀尔巴阡古堡，牛博士》让无数读者意犹未尽！(13)

In the ordinary course of things, epidemics are limited in their operation. Those which attack humanity spare the animals, and those which attack the animals spare the vegetables. A horse has never been seen infected with small-pox, nor a man with the cowpest, nor do sheep suffer from the potato-rot. But here all the laws of nature seemed to be overturned. Not only were the character, temperament, and ideas of the townsfolk changed, but the domestic animals—dogs and cats, horses and cows, asses and goats—fell under the influence of this epidemic, as if their habitual equilibrium had been changed. The very plants themselves were infected by a similar strange-metamorphosis.
In the gardens and market-gardens and orchards strange symptoms appeared. Climbing plants climbed more audaciously than ever. Tufted plants became more tufted than ever. Shrubs became trees. Cereals, scarcely sown, showed their little green heads, and grew, in the same length of time, as much in inches as formerly, under the most favourable circumstances, they would have grown in fractions of an inch. Asparagus reached the height of several feet; the artichokes swelled to the size of melons, the melons to the size of pumpkins, the pumpkins to the Size of gourds, the gourds to the size of the church bell, which measured—my word—nine feet in diameter. The cabbages were bushes, and the mushrooms umbrellas.