On the morrow the wife hastened to the mountains with food, in search of her husband. She had not taught herself to believe that the Plague had touched him, and she feared that he might suffer from hunger. She led one of her children by the hand—his favourite child—and they were long before they found him—for although the young clear voice of the boy shouting out his name was borne far away upon the elastic air of the mountain, there was no answer to the call—alas! there could be none—the father lay cold and stiff in a gully of the rock,-the Plague-smitten had ceased to suffer!
The anguish of the unfortunate woman may be conceived—In her first agony she sprang towards the body, but the shriek of her child recalled her to a sense of her peril, and the fate that she would entail upon her little ones. The struggle was long and bitter; and at length she turned away with the weeping boy, and returned into the village to proclaim her widowhood.
I have already mentioned the fact of my having on one occasion inadvertently ridden into the midst of a Plague-encampment. Such occurrences are, however, rare; as, in the event of several families being compromised and sent to the mountains, there is generally a military guard stationed at every avenue leading to their temporary dwellings, to prevent the approach of strangers, and to form their medium of subsistence.
A melancholy tale was related to me by a lady at Therapia, who had watched from day to day the proceedings of one of these little mountain colonies through a telescope. It consisted of a miserable family; the father gray-haired and feeble, and the mother bent and palsied—The children died first, one by one, for the disease drank their young blood more eagerly than the chill stream which moved sluggishly through the veins of the aged parents; and at length the old couple were left alone.
They used to sit side by side for hours under a tree facing their village—the birth-place of their dead ones, whom they had put into the earth with their own hands—but within a week the childless mother sickened in her turn and the gray old man dragged a wretched mattress to the foot of the tree from beneath which his stricken wife had no longer power to move; and he held the water to her lips, and he put the bread into her grasp; but all his care availed her nothing—and with his lean and trembling hands he scratched her a grave under the shadows of the tree that she had loved in life; and, when the earth had hidden her from his sight, he lay down across the narrow mound to die in his turn. His worldly toils were ended!