id his visit,
and no doctor came. I presumed that the sirocco detained him
also; but as the state of Jadin appeared to me alarming, I
resolved to go and rouse my Esculapius, and bring him, willing
or unwilling, to the hotel. I took my hat and sallied forth.

"Messina had the appearance of a city of the dead: not an
inhabitant was walking in the streets, not a head was seen at
the windows. The mendicants themselves (and he who has not seen
the Sicilian mendicant, knows not what wretchedness is,) lay in
the corners of the streets, stretched out, doubled up, panting,
without strength to stretch out their hand for charity, or
voice to ask an alms. Pompeii, which I visited three months
afterwards, was not more silent, more solitary, more inanimate.

"I reached the doctor's. I rang, I knocked, no one answered. I
pushed against the door, it opened;--I entered, and pursued my
search for the doctor.

"I traversed three or four apartments. There were women lying
upon sofas, and children sprawling on the floor. Not one even
raised a head to look at me. At last, in one of the rooms, the
door of which was, like the rest, half-open, I found the man I
was in quest of, stretched upon his bed.

"I went up to him, I took him by the hand, and felt his pulse.

"'Ah,' said he, with a melancholy voice, and scarcely turning
his head towards me, 'Is that you? What can you want?'

"'Want!--I want you to come and see my friend, who is no
better, as it seems to me.'

"'Go and see your friend!' cried the doctor, in a
fright--'impossible!'

"'Why impossible?'

"He made a desperate effort to move, and taking his cane in his
left hand, passed his right hand slowly down it, from the
golden head that adorned it to the other extremity. 'Look you,'
said he, 'my cane sweats.'

"And, in fact, there fell some globules of water from it, such
an effect has this terrible wind even on inanimate things.

"'Well,' said I, 'and what does that prove?'

"'That proves, that at such a time as this, there are no
physicians, all are patients.[3]'"--P. 175.

[3] The extreme misery of the paupers in Sicily, who form, he
tells us, a tenth part of the population, quite haunts the
imagination of M. Dumas. He recurs to it several times. At one
place he witnesses the distribution, at the door of a c