oyers. They must be, from such
seasons as you have every few years."

"So all strangers think. But to the resident, who from choice, or
business engagements, has passed one summer in the city, 'Jack' loses
his terrors. The symptoms are unmistakable. Slight nausea and pain in
the back, headache and a _soupcon_ of chill. The workingman feels
these. He can not spare the time or the doctor's bill, perhaps. He
poohs the matter--it will pass off--and goes to work. The delay and the
sun set the disease; and he is brought home at night--or staggers to
the nearest hospital--to die of the black vomit in thirty-six hours.
Hence, the great mortality.

"Now, I feel these pains, I at once recognize the fever, go right home,
bathe feet and back in hot water, take a strong aperient, put mustard
on my stomach and pile on the blankets. In an hour I am bathed in sweat
till maybe it drips through the mattress. I put on another blanket,
take a hot draught with an opiate, and go to sleep. It is not a
pleasant thing, with the thermometer at ninety degrees in the shade;
but when I wake in the morning, I have saved an attack of fever."

This regimen was constantly repeated to me. In the district crowded
with the poorer classes, who are dependent on their daily labor for
their daily bread, the fever stalks gaunt and noisome, marking his
victims and seldom in vain. All day long, and far into the night in bad
seasons, the low, dull rumble of the dead-cart echoed through the
narrow streets; and at the door of every squalid house was the plain
pine box that held what was left of some one of its loved inmates. Yet
through this carnival of death, steadily and fearlessly, the better
class of workers walk; not dreading the contagion and secure in their
harness of precaution.

To sleep in the infected atmosphere in sickly quarters was thought more
dangerous; but any business man considered himself safe, if he only
breathed the poisonous air in the daytime. The resident physicians, in
their recent treatment, feel the disease quite in their hands, when no
other foe than the fever is to be combated. Any preceding excess of
diet, drink or excitement is apt to aggravate it; but in ordinary
cases, where proper remedies are taken in season, nine out of ten
patients recover.

Otherwise, this ratio is just reversed; and in the working
classes--especially strangers--to take the fever, in bad years, is to
die. The utmost efforts of science, the most potent dr