I was
strangely affected with this sight (so discordant to my feelings
and the state of the city), before I recollected the age and
ignorance of the child. I was confined the next day by an attack of
the fever, and was sorry to hear, upon my recovery, that the father
and mother of this little creature died a few days after my last
visit to them.
The streets every-where discovered marks of the distress that
pervaded the city. More than one-half the houses were shut up,
although not more than one-third of the inhabitants had fled into
the country. In walking, for many hundred yards, few persons were
met, except such as were in quest of a physician, a nurse, a
bleeder, or the men who buried the dead. The hearse alone kept up
the remembrance of the noise of carriages or carts in the streets.
Funeral processions were laid aside. A black man leading or driving
a horse, with a corpse on a pair of chair-wheels, with now and then
half a dozen relations or friends following at a distance from it,
met the eye in most of the streets of the city, at every hour of
the day, while the noise of the same wheels passing slowly over the
pavements, kept alive anguish and fear in the sick and well, every
hour of the night.
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