Portmahomak and Inver, and bore heavily on the parishes of
Nigg and Urquhart, with the towns of Inverness, Nairn, Avoch, Dingwall,
and Rosemarkie; in fine, the quarantine seaport town that seemed at
first to be most in danger from the disease, appeared latterly to be
almost the only place of any size in the locality exempted from its
ravages. It approached, however, alarmingly near. The opening of the
Cromarty Firth is little more than a mile across; a glass of the
ordinary power enables one to count every pane in the windows of the
dwellings that mottle its northern shore, and to distinguish their
inhabitants; and yet among these dwellings cholera was raging; and we
could see, in at least one instance, a dead body borne forth by two
persons on a hand-barrow, and buried in a neighbouring sand-bank.
Stories, too, of the sad fate of individuals with whom the townsfolk
were acquainted, and who had resided in well-known localities, told
among them with powerful effect. Such was the general panic in the
infected places, that the bodies of the dead were no longer carried to
the churchyard, but huddled up in solitary holes and corners; and the
pictures suggested to the fancy, of familiar faces lying uncoffined in
the ground beside some lonely wood, or in some dark morass or heathy
moor, were fraught to many with a terror stronger than that of death. We
knew that the corpse of a young robust fisherman, who used occasionally
to act as one of the Cromarty ferrymen, and with whose appearance, in
consequence, every one was familiar, lay festering in a sand-bank; that
the iron frame of a brawny blacksmith was decomposing in a mossy hole
beside a thorn-bush; that half the inhabitants of the little fishing
village of Inver were strewn in shallow furrows along the arid waste
which surrounded their dwellings; that houses divested of their tenants,
and become foul dens of contagion, had been set on fire and burnt to the
ground; and that around the infected fishing-hamlets of Hilton and
Balintore the country-people had drawn a sort of _barriere sanitaire_,
and cooped up within the limits of their respective villages the
wretched inhabitants. And in the general consternation--a consternation
much more extreme than that evinced when the disease actually visited
the place--it was asked by the townsfolk whether _they_ ought not so
long as the place remained uninfected, to draw a similar _cordon_ round
themselves. A public meeting was according