journals have since published that on one day, on the 10th of April, two thousand people died. But the people would not be deceived by any such official statement, and continually complained that far more died than were accounted for. My barber told me how an old woman sat at her window a whole night on the Faubourg Montmartre to count the corpses which were carried by, and she counted three hundred; but when morning came she was chilled with frost, and felt the cramp of the cholera, and soon died herself. Wherever one looked in the streets, there he saw funerals, or, sadder still, hearses with no one following. But as there were not hearses sufficient, all kinds of vehicles were used, which, when covered with black stuffs, looked very strange. Even these were at last wanting, and I saw coffins carried in hackney-coaches.[1] It was most disagreeable to see the great furniture-
- ↑ I have heard my father relate how, during a terrible attack of yellow fever in Philadelphia in the earlier part of the present century, he remained by a friend who died in a lodging-house, and the panic was so great that no medical attendance or any kind of aid whatever could be had during the last stages. The patient passed away about midnight, and my father, going forth, with some difficulty obtained a coffin or box and a black man, with whose help the body was nailed up, put into a hackney-coach and taken to the burying-ground. Of this yellow fever pestilence I remember a strange tale. There was a very small house of one storey in Eleventh Street, near Locust, in which a man had been left to die, and the doors locked. He recovered,
