n; but
no one dared express aloud the soul-quailing intelligence. When any one met
a friend in the street, he only cried as he hurried on, "You know!"--
while the other, with an ejaculation of fear and horror, would answer,--
"What will become of us?" At length it was mentioned in the newspapers. The
paragraph was inserted in an obscure part: "We regret to state that there
can be no longer a doubt of the plague having been introduced at Leghorn,
Genoa, and Marseilles." No word of comment followed; each reader made his
own fearful one. We were as a man who hears that his house is burning, and
yet hurries through the streets, borne along by a lurking hope of a
mistake, till he turns the corner, and sees his sheltering roof enveloped
in a flame. Before it had been a rumour; but now in words uneraseable, in
definite and undeniable print, the knowledge went forth. Its obscurity of
situation rendered it the more conspicuous: the diminutive letters grew
gigantic to the bewildered eye of fear: they seemed graven with a pen of
iron, impressed by fire, woven in the clouds, stamped on the very front of
the universe.

The English, whether travellers or residents, came pouring in one great
revulsive stream, back on their own country; and with them crowds of
Italians and Spaniards. Our little island was filled even to bursting. At
first an unusual quantity of specie made its appearance with the emigrants;
but these people had no means of receiving back into their hands what they
spent among us. With the advance of summer, and the increase of the
distemper, rents were unpaid, and their remittances failed them. It was
impossible to see these crowds of wretched, perishing creatures, late
nurslings of luxury, and not stretch out a hand to save them. As at the
conclusion of the eighteenth century, the English unlocked their hospitable
store, for the relief of those driven from their homes by political
revolution; so now they were not backward in affording aid to the victims
of a more wide-spreading calamity. We had many foreign friends whom we
eagerly sought out, and relieved from dreadful penury. Our Castle became an
asylum for the unhappy. A little population occupied its halls. The revenue
of its possessor, which had always found a mode of expenditure congenial to
his generous nature, was now attended to more parsimoniously, that it might
embrace a wider portion of utility. It was not however money, except
partially, but the necessaries