When we entered, we were assailed with yells in many languages, and
howls in the common tongue, as if all the fiends of the pit had
broken loose. We took off our hats in obedience to the demand; but
the clamor did not wholly subside, and was mingled with singing and
horrible laughter. Floating about in each vat, we at first saw
twenty or thirty human heads. The women could be distinguished from
the men by the manner of dressing the hair. Each wore a loose woolen
gown. Each had a little table floating before him or her, which he
or she pushed about at pleasure. One wore a hideous mask; another
kept diving in the opaque pool and coming up to blow, like the
hippopotamus in the Zoological Gardens; some were taking a lunch from
their tables, others playing chess; some sitting on the benches round
the edges, with only heads out of water, as doleful as owls, while
others roamed about, engaged in the game of spattering with their
comrades, and sang and shouted at the top of their voices. The
people in this bath were said to be second class; but they looked as
well and behaved better than those of the first class, whom we saw in
the establishment at our hotel afterward.

It may be a valuable scientific fact, that the water in these vats,
in which people of all sexes, all diseases, and all nations spend so
many hours of the twenty-four, is changed once a day. The
temperature at which the bath is given is ninety-eight. The water is
let in at night, and allowed to cool. At five in the morning, the
bathers enter it, and remain until ten o'clock,--five hours, having
breakfast served to them on the floating tables, "as they sail, as
they sail." They then have a respite till two, and go in till five.
Eight hours in hot water! Nothing can be more disgusting than the
sight of these baths. Gustave Dore must have learned here how to
make those ghostly pictures of the lost floating about in the Stygian
pools, in his illustrations of the Inferno; and the rocks and
cavernous precipices may have enabled him to complete the picture.
On what principle cures are effected in these filthy vats, I could
not learn. I have a theory, that, where so many diseases meet and
mingle in one swashing fluid, they neutralize each other. It may be
that the action is that happily explained by one of the Hibernian
bathmen in an American water-cure establishment. "You see, sir,"
said he, "that the shock of the water unites with the electricity of
the system, and e