go
in your present weak state."

"Oh yes, I shall be better for the change. This frightful cholera is
spreading on all sides. The sooner, dear John, we can leave this place
the better. Two persons, Mrs. Waddel told me, died last night of it,
only a few doors off. I know that it is foolish to be afraid of an evil
which we cannot avoid; but I find it impossible to divest myself of this
fear. I look worse than I feel just now," she continued, walking across
the room, and surveying her face in the glass. "My colour is
returning--I shall pass muster with the doctors yet."

The great business of packing up for the voyage went steadily forward
all day; and before six in the evening, trunks, bedding, and little ship
stores, were on board, ready for a start.

Flora was surprised in the afternoon by a visit from Mr. and Mrs. Gregg,
and the two rosy girls, who expressed the greatest regret at their
departure. They had made a plum-cake for Mrs. Lyndsay to eat during the
voyage; and truly it looked big enough to have lasted out a trip to the
South Seas, while Mrs. Gregg had brought various small tin canisters
filled with all sorts of farinaceous food for the baby.

Abundant as their kindness was, the blessings and good wishes they
heaped upon the emigrants were more abundant still; the kind-hearted
mother and her bonnie girls, kissing them at parting, with tears
coursing down their rosy cheeks. Mr. Gregg, who was terribly afraid of
the cholera, tried to raise his own spirits, by describing all the fatal
symptoms of the disease, and gave them a faithful catalogue of those who
had died of it that morning in the city. He had great faith in a new
remedy, which was just then making a noise in the town, which had been
tried the day before, on a relation of his own--the injection of salt
into veins of the sufferer.

"Did it cure him?" asked Flora, rather eagerly.

"Why no, I canna jest say that it did. But it enabled him to mak' his
will an' settle a' his worldly affairs, which was a great point gained."

"For the living," sighed Flora. "Small satisfaction to the dying, to be
disturbed in their last agonies, by attending to matters of business,
while a greater reckoning is left unpaid."

"You look ill yoursel, Mistress Lyndsay," continued the gude man. "Let's
hope that it's not the commencement of the awfu' disease."

"I thought so myself two days ago," said Flora. "I am grateful to God
that it was not the cholera. Does it ever b