strangely affected with this sight (so discordant to my feelings
and the state of the city), before I recollected the age and
ignorance of the child. I was confined the next day by an attack of
the fever, and was sorry to hear, upon my recovery, that the father
and mother of this little creature died a few days after my last
visit to them.

The streets every-where discovered marks of the distress that
pervaded the city. More than one-half the houses were shut up,
although not more than one-third of the inhabitants had fled into
the country. In walking, for many hundred yards, few persons were
met, except such as were in quest of a physician, a nurse, a
bleeder, or the men who buried the dead. The hearse alone kept up
the remembrance of the noise of carriages or carts in the streets.
Funeral processions were laid aside. A black man leading or driving
a horse, with a corpse on a pair of chair-wheels, with now and then
half a dozen relations or friends following at a distance from it,
met the eye in most of the streets of the city, at every hour of
the day, while the noise of the same wheels passing slowly over the
pavements, kept alive anguish and fear in the sick and well, every
hour of the night.

The population of Philadelphia at this time was but sixty thousand, and
the reader will see that a loss of four thousand was a heavy percentage
for so short a period.

Dr. Rush's skill and heroic conduct in his efforts to stay the ravages
of the plague made him famous, not only in his own country, but
throughout Europe, and during the latter part of his life he received
most gratifying evidences of this fact. In 1805 the King of Prussia sent
him a coronation medal, and the King of Spain tendered him his thanks
for his replies to certain questions addressed to him concerning the
causes and proper treatment of yellow fever. In 1807 the Queen of
Etruria presented him with a gold medal as a mark of respect; and in
1811 the Emperor of Russia sent him a testimonial of his admiration of
his medical character.

In 1799 he was made treasurer of the United States Mint, which position
he held until his death.

Dr. Rush's writings were voluminous, and embraced a variety of subjects.
His medical productions occupy a high place in the literature of the
profession, and his political essays were one of the features of his
day. He was a