ed their food; the gulls
and cormorants floated languidly over our dwelling, overpowered by the
heat; and the dead silence, which in the afternoon and evenings prevailed,
made a most melancholy and affecting impression on my mind.

The plague that summer, (I may limit the period to three months,) carried
off more than fifty thousand persons. For some time the mortality amounted
to a thousand _per diem_. The number of corpses which passed the limited
range of my window daily increased; and after witnessing the spectacle for
some time, I always insensibly avoided the sight of the dead, and felt a
cold shudder run over my frame whenever the voice of the priest
accompanying the corpses struck my ear. So dreadful is the malady, so
surely contagious, and so mortal, that so soon as attacked, the
unfortunate being is deserted by relatives and friends, and when dead, two
or four porters beside a priest were generally the only persons who
attended the body to the grave. When the deceased is a Mussulman, he is
more frequently attended during his illness, and after death to his tomb,
than if a Christian. With the former, the plague is a visitation of
Providence, from which it is both useless and a sin to escape, while with
the latter not only is it deemed necessary to provide for one's own life,
but even to do so at the sacrifice of the dearest friend. Often I noticed
a dead body tied on a plank which a single porter carried on his back; at
other times the object would be concealed within a bag, and then the grave
was a ditch common to all, into which the porter would shake off his load
and return for another. No priest or Imam there presided over the funeral
scene; few or none were the prayers that were said over the remains: he
who but a short week before had been proud of his strength or condition,
or she who in the same short space of time previous excelled in beauty and
grace, there lay confounded in one neglected, unhonored, and putrefying
mass. The air became impregnated with the effluvia; the houses around the
Turkish cemeteries, which are mostly in the heart of the city, where the
dead are interred, but some three feet beneath the surface, were soon
deserted, their owners dead. The ever-green cypress trees under whose
umbrageous quiet the beautiful children once played, now moaned over their
little graves; and in fine, every one in the deserted city walked with
measured steps, apprehensive of threatening death: awe and const