all
my friends had gone up or down stream, or across the Pont Chartrain.
There was nothing to be seen in the whole place but meagre hollow-eyed
negresses, shirtless and masterless, running about the streets, howling
like jackals, or crawling in and out of the open doors of the houses. In
the upper suburb things were at the worst; there, whole streets were
deserted, the houses empty, the doors and windows knocked in; while the
foul fever-laden breeze came sighing over from Vera Cruz, and nothing
was to be heard but the melancholy rattle of the corpse-carts as they
proceeded slowly through the streets with their load of coffins. It was
high time to be off, when the yellow fever, the deadly _vomito_, had
thus made its triumphant entry, and was ruling and ravaging like some
mighty man of war in a stormed fortress.

I had four negroes with me, including old Sybille, who was at that time
full sixty-five years of age; Caesar, Tiberius, and Vitellius, were the
three others. We are fond of giving our horses and negroes these high
sounding appellations, as a sort of warning, I am inclined to think, to
those amongst us who sit in high places; for even in our young republic
there is no lack of would-be Caesars.

The steamers had left off running below Baton Rouge, so I resolved to
leave my gig at New Orleans, procuring in its stead a sort of dearborn
or railed cart, in which I packed the whole of my traps, consisting of a
medley of blankets and axes, barrows and ploughshares, cotton shirts and
cooking utensils. Upon the top of all this I perched myself; and those
who had known me only three or four months previously as the gay and
fashionable Mr Howard, one of the leaders of the _ton_, the deviser and
proposer of fetes, balls, and gaieties of all kinds, might well have
laughed, could they have seen me half buried amongst pots and pans,
bottles and bundles, spades and mattocks, and suchlike useful but homely
instruments. There was nobody there to laugh, however, or to cry either.
Tears were then scarce articles in New Orleans; for people had got
accustomed to death, and their feelings were more or less blunted. But
even had the yellow fever not been there, I doubt if any one would have
laughed at me; there is too much sound sense amongst us. Our town
beauties--ay, the most fashionable and elegant of them--think nothing of
installing themselves, with their newly wedded husbands, in the
aforesaid dearborns, and moving off to the far