believed, with a dreadful design. Besides these, they led me to see a
large and deeply chiselled marble vase, or basin, supported upon twelve
oxen, also of marble and of life size, and of which they told some
romantic stories. They said the deluded persons, most of whom were
emigrants from a great distance, believed their deity countenanced their
reception here of a baptism of regeneration as proxies for whomsoever
they held in warm affection in the countries from which they had come:
that here parents "went into the water" for their lost children,
children for their parents, widows for their spouses, and young persons
for their lovers: that thus the great vase came to be associated with
all their most cherished memories, and was therefore the chief object of
all others in the building, upon which they bestowed the greatest degree
of their idolatrous affection. On this account, the victors had so
diligently desecrated it as to render the apartment in which it was
contained too noisome to abide in.

They permitted me also to ascend into the steeple to see where it had
been struck by lightning on the Sabbath before; and to look out, east
and south, on wasted farms--like those I had seen near the
city--extending till they were lost in the distance. Close to the scar
left by the thunderbolt were fragments of food, cruses of liquor and
broken drinking-vessels, with a bass-drum and a steamboat signal-bell,
of which, with pain, I learned the use.

It was after nightfall when I was ready to cross the river on my return.
The wind had freshened since sunset and, the water beating roughly into
my little boat, I headed higher up the stream than the point I had left
in the morning, and landed where a faint glimmering light invited me to
steer. Among the rushes--sheltered only by the darkness, without roof
between them and the sky--I came upon a crowd of several hundred human
creatures whom my movements roused from uneasy slumber.

Dreadful indeed was the suffering of these forsaken beings. Cowed and
cramped by cold and sunburn alternating as each weary day and night
dragged on, they were, almost all of them, the crippled victims of
disease. They were there because they had no homes, nor hospital, nor
poorhouse, nor friends to offer them any. They could not minister to the
needs of their sick; they had no bread to quiet the fractious, hungry
cries of their children. Mothers and babes, daughters and grandparents,
all alike were clo