whose high tapering spire was radiant with white and gold. The city
appeared to cover several miles; and beyond it, in the background,
spread a fair rolling country, checkered by symmetrical lines of
fruitful husbandry. The unmistakable evidences of industry, enterprise,
and educated wealth, everywhere, made the scene one of singular and most
striking beauty.

It was a natural impulse to visit this inviting region. I procured a
skiff and rowing across the river landed at the principal wharf of the
city. No one met me there. I looked, and saw no one: I heard no
movement: though the stillness everywhere was such that I heard the
flies buzz, and the ripples break against the shallows of the beach. I
walked through the solitary streets. The town lay as in a dream, under
some deadening spell of loneliness from which I almost feared to wake
it. Plainly it had not slept long. There was no grass growing in the
paved ways and rain had not washed away the prints of footsteps in the
dust. Yet I went about unchecked. I went into empty ropewalks,
workshops, and smithies. The spinner's wheel was idle; the carpenter had
gone from his workbench and left his sash and casing unfinished. Fresh
bark was in the tanner's vat, and the fresh chopped lightwood stood
piled against the baker's oven. The blacksmith's shop was cold; but his
coal-heap and ladling-pool and crooked water-horn were all there, as if
he had just gone off for a holiday. No workpeople, anywhere, looked to
know my errand. If I went into the gardens, clinking the wicket latch
loudly after me, to pull the marigolds, heartsease, and lady's-slippers,
and draw a drink with the water-sodden well-bucket and its noisy chain;
or, knocking off with my stick the tall, heavy-headed dahlias and
sunflowers, hunting among the beds for cucumbers and love-apples--no one
called out to me from any opened window; no dog sprang forward to bark
an alarm. I could have supposed the people hidden in the houses, but the
doors were unfastened; and when at last I timidly entered, I found dead
ashes cold upon the hearth, and had to tread on tiptoe, as if walking
down the aisle of a country church, to avoid rousing irreverent echoes
from the naked floors.

On the outskirts of the town was the city graveyard. But there was no
record of plague there, nor did it in any wise differ much from other
Protestant American cemeteries. Some of the mounds were not long sodded;
some of the stones were newly set,