ntry seems cold and deserted. Stranger and more
fatal still, every steeple rings out a funeral knell. Whatever there is
of activity, movement, or life, appears concentrated in that lugubrious
and far-sounding vibration.

Lights begin to show themselves in the dark villages, but they rise not
from the cheerful and pleasant rustic hearth. They are as red as the
fires of the herdsmen, seen at night through the midst of the fog. And
then these lights do not remain motionless. They creep slowly towards the
churchyard of every village. Louder sounds the death-knell, the air
trembles beneath the strokes of so many bells, and, at rare intervals,
the funeral chant rises faintly to the summit of the hill.

Why so many interments? What valley of desolation is this, where the
peaceful songs which follow the hard labors of the day are replaced by
the death dirge? where the repose of evening is exchanged for the repose
of eternity? What is this valley of the shadow, where every village
mourns for its many dead, and buries them at the same hour of the same
night?

Alas! the deaths are so sudden and numerous and frightful that there is
hardly time to bury the dead. During day the survivors are chained to the
earth by hard but necessary toil; and only in the evening, when they
return from the fields, are they able, though sinking with fatigue, to
dig those other furrows, in which their brethren are to lie heaped like
grains of corn.

And this valley is not the only one that has seen the desolation. During
a series of fatal years, many villages, many towns, many cities, many
great countries, have seen, like this valley, their hearths deserted and
cold--have seen, like this valley, mourning take the place of joy, and
the death-knell substituted for the noise of festival--have wept in the
same day for their many dead, and buried them at night by the lurid glare
of torches.

For, during those fatal years, an awful wayfarer had slowly journeyed
over the earth, from one pole to the other--from the depths of India and
Asia to the ice of Siberia--from the ice of Siberia to the borders of the
seas of France.

This traveller, mysterious as death, slow as eternity, implacable as
fate, terrible as the hand of heaven, was the CHOLERA!

The tolling of bells and the funeral chants still rose from the depths of
the valley to the summit of the hill, like the complaining of a mighty
voice; the glare of the funeral torches was still seen afar thro