y fathoms of chain, the other had parted on the windlass in the
gale. The bark's prow was now turned toward Montevideo, the place we had
so recently sailed from, full of hope and pleasant anticipation; and
here we were, dejected and filled with misery, some of our number
already gone on that voyage which somehow seems so far away.

At Montevideo, things were better. They _did_ take my remaining sick men
out of the vessel, after two days' delay; my agent procuring a tug,
which towed them in the ship's boat three hundred fathoms astern. In
this way they were taken to Flores Island, where, days and days before,
they had been refused admittance! They were accompanied this time by an
order from the governor of Montevideo, and at last were taken in. Two of
the cases were, by this time, in the favourable change. But the poor old
cook, who stood faithfully by me, and would not desert his old
shipmates, going with them to the Island to care for them to the last,
took the dread disease, died of it, and was there buried, not far from
where he himself had buried his friend Jose, a short time before. The
death of this faithful man occurred on the day that the bark finally
sailed seaward, by the Island. She was in sight from the hospital
window when his phantom ship, that put out, carried him over the bar!
His widow, at Paranagua, I was told, on learning the fate of her
husband, died of grief.

The work of disinfecting the vessel, at Montevideo, after the sick were
removed, was a source of speculation that was most elaborately carried
on. Demijohns of carbolic acid were put on board, by the dozen, at $3.00
per demijohn, all diluted ready for use; and a _guardo_ was put on board
to use it up, which he did religiously over his own precious self, in my
after-cabin, as far from the end of the ship where the danger was as he
could get. Some one else disinfected _el proa_, not he! Abundant as the
stuff was, I had to look sharp for enough to wash out forward while aft
it was knee-deep almost, at three dollars a jar! The harpy that alighted
on deck at Maldonado sent in his bill for one hundred dollars--I paid
eighty.

The cost to me of all this trouble in money paid out, irrelevantly to
mention, was over a thousand dollars. What it cost me in health and
mental anxiety cannot be estimated by such value. Still, I was not the
greatest sufferer. My hardest task was to come, you will believe, at the
gathering up of the trinkets and other purcha