with light. By the smoky flames of
torches, which threw a red glare upon the dark fir-trees, and the white
tombstones, many grave-diggers worked merrily, humming snatches of some
favorite tune. Their laborious and hazardous industry then commanded a
very high price; they were in such request that it was necessary to humor
them. They drank often and much; they sang long and loud; and this to
keep up their strength and spirits good, absolute requisites in such an
employment. If, by chance, any did not finish the grave they had begun,
some obliging comrade finished it for them (fitting expression!), and
placed them in it with friendly care.

Other distant sounds responded to the joyous strains of the grave
diggers; public-houses had sprung up in the neighborhood of the
churchyards, and the drivers of the dead, when they had "set down their
customers," as they jocosely expressed themselves, enriched with their
unusual gratuities, feasted and made merry like lords; dawn often found
them with a glass in their hands, and a jest on their lips; and, strange
to say, among these funeral satellites, who breathed the very atmosphere
of the disease, the mortality was scarcely perceptible. In the dark,
squalid quarters of the town, where, surrounded by infectious
exhalations, the indigent population was crowded together, and miserable
beings, exhausted by severe privation, were "bespoke" by the cholera, as
it was energetically said at the time, not only individuals, but whole
families, were carried off in a few hours; and yet, sometimes, oh,
merciful Providence! one or two little children were left in the cold and
empty room, after the father and mother, brother and sister, had been
taken away in their shells.

Frequently, houses which had swarmed with hard working laborers, were
obliged to be shut up for want of tenants; in one day, they had been
completely cleared by this terrible visitation, from the cellars, where
little chimney-sweepers slept upon straw, to the garret, on whose cold
brick floor lay stretched some wan and half-naked being, without work and
without bread. But, of all the wards of Paris, that which perhaps
presented the most frightful spectacle during the progress of the
cholera, was the City; and in the City, the square before the cathedral
of Notre-Dame was almost every day the theatre of dreadful scenes: for
this locality was frequently thronged with those who conveyed the sick
from the neighboring streets to th