iddiness, sickness, diarrhoea, or sunken eyes and distressed look;
but sometimes the substance followed its forecoming shadow so quickly,
and the crisis was so rapid, that there was no time to apply any
remedies. An American carpenter complained of giddiness and
sickness--warning signs--succeeded so quickly by the worst symptoms of
cholera, that in less than an hour his face became of an indigo tint,
his limbs were doubled up horribly with violent cramps, and he died.

To the convicts--and if there could be grades of wretchedness in
Cruces, these poor creatures were the lowest--belonged the terrible
task of burying the dead; a duty to which they showed the utmost
repugnance. Not unfrequently, at some fancied alarm, they would fling
down their burden, until at last it became necessary to employ the
soldiers to see that they discharged the task allotted to them.
Ordinarily, the victims were buried immediately after death, with such
imperfect rites of sepulture as the harassed frightened priests would
pay them, and very seldom was time afforded by the authorities to the
survivors to pay those last offices to the departed which a Spaniard
and a Catholic considers so important. Once I was present at a
terrible scene in the house of a New Granada grandee, whose pride and
poverty justified many of the old Spanish proverbs levelled at his
caste.

It was when the cholera was at its height, and yet he had
left--perhaps on important business--his wife and family, and gone to
Panama for three days. On the day after his departure, the plague
broke out in his house, and my services were required promptly. I
found the miserable household in terrible alarm, and yet confining
their exertions to praying to a coarse black priest in a black
surplice, who, kneeling beside the couch of the Spanish lady, was
praying (in his turn) to some favourite saint in Cruces. The sufferer
was a beautiful woman, suffering from a violent attack of cholera,
with no one to help her, or even to take from her arms the poor little
child they had allowed her to retain. In her intervals of comparative
freedom from pain, her cries to the Madonna and her husband were
heartrending to hear. I had the greatest difficulty to rout the stupid
priest and his as stupid worshippers, and do what I could for the
sufferer. It was very little, and before long the unconscious Spaniard
was a widower. Soon after, the authorities came for the body. I never
saw such passionate ang