tal I found some light employment for a few days,
when I agreed to take another trip across the lake. Previous to my going
on board of the vessel I returned to the hospital, where I had left some
of my clothing, took with me such as I wanted, and left some of my heavy
articles in charge of a sailor named Daniel Dunn, with whom I had formed
a short acquaintance in the hospital, and proceeded over the lake, where
we remained a few days, and then returned to the city. On my return I
found the cholera had broken out and was raging to such an alarming
degree that the inhabitants were terror-struck. The returns of deaths
were over two hundred per day. Laborers wages for digging in the church
burying ground was seven dollars per day. Not being able to procure
laborers sufficient to dig single graves, they dug canals about one
hundred rods in length, of sufficient depth to place three coffins one
above the other, the water in the bottom of it being about eighteen
inches deep. All graves dug in New Orleans are half filled with water
before the coffins are deposited in them.

The morning after my return I proceeded to the hospital to see after my
clothing. On visiting the building I was much surprised on walking
through many of the rooms without seeing a living soul. In the back yard
I found eight or ten dead bodies laying on the ground in a putrid state.
I then searched the upper stories, and in a room called the small-pox
ward, I found one dead body laying on a bed covered with a woollen
blanket, in a very putrid state, the offensive gas rising through the
blanket like a dense fog. Some few were still alive, but suffering for
want of attendance. On descending the stairs I met the assistant
physician of the hospital, and asked him the cause of this great neglect
of the few who were still living. He told me that Doctor M'Farlane, the
proprietor, was very sick, and that the cook, steward, washer woman, and
the black man who conveyed the corpses to the grave, were all dead, and
that they could not procure any assistance. He asked me if I would try
to hire some help for him. I told him that I would use my best exertions
to procure him some, but if I could not obtain any I would assist him
myself. I then left him and returned to my lodgings. Just before I left
my boarding house to visit the hospital I heard one of the boarders, a
journeyman hatter, who had been on a drunken frolic for some days, say
that he had spent all his money and