The pious redoubled their fervour; the pleasure lovers their desperate gayety, supping with dare-devil luxury, betting on one another's chances of death and the trenches, of which ghastly tales of burial alive were told. One, the wildest of a gay supper party, extracted a promise from his friends that he at least should not be buried alive. He did not appear the next evening, and his friends, organizing a searching party for him, traced him to a cholera trench; had it opened; he was found dressed as he had left the supper, just under the earth, his handsome face stiff in its dead convulsion of horror, his hands outstretched in the effort of crawling and struggling through the putrid dead towards life above. Those who did not believe died with their ruling passion on their lips; a passionate novel reader towards the end sent a friend out to buy the last novel of Sir Walter Scott's, which had been daily expected. It was placed in his hands . . . his cold fingers could turn the leaves, but his eyes were growing dim. "I am blind," he gasped, "I cannot see. I must be dying, and leaving this new production of immortal genius unread." Another one died uttering the name of Napoleon Bonaparte. The same epidemics returned the following summer, killing in the twelve months ten thousand out of a population of fifty-five thousand. In 1847, 1848, and 1849, eight per cent of the people died.
In the summer of 1853 the climax of death was reached. Over five thousand raw emigrants, Irish, English, and German, had landed during the year, and the city was in a state of upheaval—canals being widened and deepened, ditches dug, gas and water mains extended, new road beds constructed. Street cleaning being yet in an experimental condition, the
