every morning, when he announced how many had died or the loss of some one known. The expression "stuck into the sack" was no mere figure of speech, for coffins were soon wanting, and the greater part of the dead were buried in bags. When I, a week ago, passed a great open public building, and saw in the roomy halls the merry people, the gaily springing Frenchies (Französchen), the dainty little gossiping Frenchwomen, who did their shopping laughing and joking, I remembered that here, during the time of the cholera, there were ranged high piled, one on the other, many hundreds of white sacks containing every one a corpse, and that there were then heard here very few, but all the more terrible voices, or those of the watchers of the dead, who with a grim indifference counted out the sacks to the men who buried them, and how the latter, as they piled them on their cars, repeated the numbers in lower tones, or complained harshly that they had received one corpse too few, over which there often arose a strange dispute. And I remember how two small boys with sorrowful faces stood by, and that one asked me if I could tell him in which sack his father was.[1]
- ↑ It is a strange fact that the cholera of 1832, with all its horrors, was as nothing compared to the pestilences which had previously swept over the world. Then the dead in the great capitals of Europe were often not buried at all, and lay every-
