ered from town to town, from province to
province, seeking some survivor for a companion, and abhorring the
loneliness to which he was condemned. When he discovered our troop, fear of
contagion conquered his love of society. He dared not join us, yet he could
not resolve to lose sight of us, sole human beings who besides himself
existed in wide and fertile France; so he accompanied us in the spectral
guise I have described, till pestilence gathered him to a larger
congregation, even that of Dead Mankind.

It had been well, if such vain terrors could have distracted our thoughts
from more tangible evils. But these were too dreadful and too many not to
force themselves into every thought, every moment, of our lives. We were
obliged to halt at different periods for days together, till another and
yet another was consigned as a clod to the vast clod which had been once
our living mother. Thus we continued travelling during the hottest season;
and it was not till the first of August, that we, the emigrants,--reader,
there were just eighty of us in number,--entered the gates of Dijon.

We had expected this moment with eagerness, for now we had accomplished the
worst part of our drear journey, and Switzerland was near at hand. Yet how
could we congratulate ourselves on any event thus imperfectly fulfilled?
Were these miserable beings, who, worn and wretched, passed in sorrowful
procession, the sole remnants of the race of man, which, like a flood, had
once spread over and possessed the whole earth? It had come down clear and
unimpeded from its primal mountain source in Ararat, and grew from a puny
streamlet to a vast perennial river, generation after generation flowing on
ceaselessly. The same, but diversified, it grew, and swept onwards towards
the absorbing ocean, whose dim shores we now reached. It had been the mere
plaything of nature, when first it crept out of uncreative void into light;
but thought brought forth power and knowledge; and, clad with these, the
race of man assumed dignity and authority. It was then no longer the mere
gardener of earth, or the shepherd of her flocks; "it carried with it an
imposing and majestic aspect; it had a pedigree and illustrious ancestors;
it had its gallery of portraits, its monumental inscriptions, its records
and titles."[1]

This was all over, now that the ocean of death had sucked in the slackening
tide, and its source was dried up. We first had bidden adieu to the state
of thi