Truly, the poor young creature needed all this faith to enable her to bear the troubles that were, and those that were to come. She carried little Coralie back to her own poor room. She sought out what plain sewing and clear starching she could get to do in her own home; but this was very little, now that so many of the ladies and gentlemen among whom she hoped to get employment had left the city for the Northern watering-places. It brought her a very scanty income; and as, out of this, room rent, fuel, light, food, clothing, medicine and other incidental expenses had to be paid, and as, besides, she would not suffer little Coralie to want any comfort, or even any luxury, that she could procure for her by her own exertions and self-denial, it followed, of course, that she herself went without a sufficiency of the real necessaries of life; and so, privation being added to her other ills, accelerated the decline of her health.
Valentine could only come to see them once a week. He would come Sunday morning, spend the day in nursing his darling, tear himself from her clinging baby arms, and return, almost broken-hearted, at night.
This was the condition of things when the yellow fever made its appearance at M----. This was nothing new--the pestilence was no stranger, it was an annual visitor at M----.
But this summer the fever appeared in its most terrible aspect, with all the malign, virulent and fatal characteristics of the plague.
I am not about to harrow your feelings or my own with any minute details of the misery that ensued as the pestilence advanced; of the physical agony, from pain, fever, thirst and famine; of the wretchedness, from bereavement, poverty and desertion; of the mental anguish, from terror, grief, horror and despair. The pestilence brings in its dread train almost every form of physical and moral evil; at the same time, providentially, it calls forth to combat these the most exalted virtues in the human character. You have only to call to mind the ravages of the yellow fever throughout the South in the past to estimate the horrors of the pestilence at M----. The people by hundreds fled the city; those that remained, by thousands died.
The population, reduced to less than one-half, consisted chiefly of the poorer classes, who could not get away, and of those heroic souls whom a high sense of Christian duty or simple humanity had retained in or brought to the scene of misery.