some of
his friends, and hope that she would find him alive. There was a simple,
natural earnestness about her that interested me in her fate, especially
when she assured me that her husband was the best of men,--had been so,
till want of business during these unhappy times had thrown him into bad
company. "He could not bear to come home," she said, "only to see our
children die. A man cannot have the patience a mother has, with her own
flesh and blood."

We were set down at St. Bartholomew's, and entered the wretched precincts
of the house of disease. The poor creature clung closer to me, as she saw
with what heartless haste they bore the dead from the wards, and took them
into a room, whose half-opened door displayed a number of corpses, horrible
to behold by one unaccustomed to such scenes. We were directed to the ward
where her husband had been first taken, and still was, the nurse said, if
alive. My companion looked eagerly from one bed to the other, till at the
end of the ward she espied, on a wretched bed, a squalid, haggard creature,
writhing under the torture of disease. She rushed towards him, she embraced
him, blessing God for his preservation.

The enthusiasm that inspired her with this strange joy, blinded her to the
horrors about her; but they were intolerably agonizing to me. The ward was
filled with an effluvia that caused my heart to heave with painful qualms.
The dead were carried out, and the sick brought in, with like indifference;
some were screaming with pain, others laughing from the influence of more
terrible delirium; some were attended by weeping, despairing relations,
others called aloud with thrilling tenderness or reproach on the friends
who had deserted them, while the nurses went from bed to bed, incarnate
images of despair, neglect, and death. I gave gold to my luckless
companion; I recommended her to the care of the attendants; I then hastened
away; while the tormentor, the imagination, busied itself in picturing my
own loved ones, stretched on such beds, attended thus. The country afforded
no such mass of horrors; solitary wretches died in the open fields; and I
have found a survivor in a vacant village, contending at once with famine
and disease; but the assembly of pestilence, the banqueting hall of death,
was spread only in London.

I rambled on, oppressed, distracted by painful emotions--suddenly I found
myself before Drury Lane Theatre. The play was Macbeth--the first actor
of t