ad body of a woman
lying by the wall near the door. Stretched upon the ground here and
there lay several sick persons, and the place seemed a den of
pestilence. The filthy straw was rank with the festering fever. Leaving
this habitation of death, we were met by a young woman in an agony of
despair because no one would give her a coffin to bury her father in.
She pointed to a cart at some distance, upon which his body lay, and she
was about to follow it to the grave, and he was such a good father, she
could not bear to lay him like a beast in the ground, and she begged a
coffin "for the honour of God." While she was wailing and weeping for
this boon, I cast my eye towards the cabin we had just left, and a sight
met my view which made me shudder with horror. The husband of the dead
woman came staggering out with her body upon his shoulder, slightly
covered with a piece of rotten canvass. I will not dwell upon the
details of this spectacle. Painfully and slowly he bore the remains of
the late companion of his misery to the cart. We followed him a little
way off and saw him deposit his burden along side of the father of the
young woman, and by her assistance. As the two started for the
grave-yard to bury their own dead, we pursued our walk still further on,
and entered another cabin where we encountered the climax of human
misery. Surely thought I, while regarding this new phenomenon of
suffering, there can be no lower deep than this between us and the
bottom of the grave. On asking after the condition of the inmates, the
woman to whom we addressed the question answered by taking out of the
straw three breathing skeletons, ranging from two to three feet in
height and _entirely naked_. And these human beings were alive! If they
had been dead, they could not have been such frightful spectacles, they
were alive, and, _mirabile dictu_, they could stand upon their feet and
even walk; but it was awful to see them do it. Had their bones been
divested of the skin that held them together, and been covered with a
veil of thin muslin, they would not have been more visible, especially
when one of them clung to the door, while a sister was urging it
forward, it assumed an appearance, which can have been seldom paralleled
this side of the grave. The effort which it made to cling to the door
disclosed every joint in its frame, while the deepest lines of old age
furrowed its face. The enduring of ninety years of sorrow seemed to
chronicle i