of the gutters; sulphur some
called it; others feared even to give it a name! Was it only the
wind-blown pollen of some innocuous plant?

I do not know; but to many it seemed as if the Invisible Destruction
were scattering visible seed! ... Such were the days; and each day the
terror-stricken city offered up its hecatomb to death; and the faces of
all the dead were yellow as flame!

"DECEDE--"; "DECEDEE--"; "FALLECIO;"--"DIED." ... On the door-posts,
the telegraph-poles, the pillars of verandas, the lamps,--over the
government letter-boxes,--everywhere glimmered the white annunciations
of death. All the city was spotted with them. And lime was poured
into the gutters; and huge purifying fires were kindled after sunset.

The nights began with a black heat;--there were hours when the acrid
air seemed to ferment for stagnation, and to burn the bronchial
tubing;--then, toward morning, it would grow chill with venomous
vapors, with morbific dews,--till the sun came up to lift the torpid
moisture, and to fill the buildings with oven-glow. And the
interminable procession of mourners and hearses and carriages again
began to circulate between the centres of life and of death;--and long
trains and steamships rushed from the port, with heavy burden of
fugitives.

Wealth might flee; yet even in flight there was peril. Men, who might
have been saved by the craft of experienced nurses at home, hurriedly
departed in apparent health, unconsciously carrying in their blood the
toxic principle of a malady unfamiliar to physicians of the West and
North;--and they died upon their way, by the road-side, by the
river-banks, in woods, in deserted stations, on the cots of quarantine
hospitals. Wiser those who sought refuge in the purity of the pine
forests, or in those near Gulf Islands, whence the bright sea-breath
kept ever sweeping back the expanding poison into the funereal swamps,
into the misty lowlands. The watering-resorts became
overcrowded;--then the fishing villages were thronged,--at least all
which were easy to reach by steamboat or by lugger. And at last, even
Viosca's Point,--remote and unfamiliar as it was,--had a stranger to
shelter: a good old gentleman named Edwards, rather broken down in
health--who came as much for quiet as for sea-air, and who had been
warmly recommended to Feliu by Captain Harris. For some years he had
been troubled by a disease of the heart.

Certainly the old invalid could not have foun