_April 24._--The plague still raging with most destructive violence; the two servants in our next neighbour's house are both dead, and two horses left, I fear, to starve. A poor Armenian woman has just been here, to beg a little sugar for a little infant she picked up in the street this morning; and she says, another neighbour of her's picked up two more. They have just been digging graves beside our house. Almost all the cotton is consumed, so that persons are wandering all over the city to find some, for burying their dead. Water not to be had at any price, nor a water-carrier to be seen. Oh, what heart-rending scenes sin has introduced into the world! Oh, when will the Lord come to put an end to these scenes of disorder, physical as well as moral? In one short month, not less than 30,000 souls have passed from time to eternity in this city, and yet, even now, no diminution apparently of deaths. Surely the judgment of the Lord is on this land? One more taken from the little passage opposite, making nineteen from the eight houses.
_April 25._--To-day, three more from the same passage, making twenty-one from these houses. Such a disease I never heard of or witnessed; certainly not more than one in twenty recovers; every one attacked seems to die.
This has been a heart-rending day. The accounts from the Residency, and the falling of a wall, undermined by the water, obliged me to go out, and I found nothing but signs of death and desolation; hardly a soul in the streets, unless such as were carrying the dead, or themselves affected with plague, and at a number of doors, and in the lanes, bundles of clothes that had been taken from the dead, and put out. The Court of the Mosque was shut, having no place left for burying, and graves were digging in every direction in the roads, and in the unoccupied stables about the city. The water also has increased so much as to be within a few inches of inundating the city. Should this further calamity come on this side, as it has on the other, the height of human misery will be near its climax, for where they will then bury their dead I know not. There seems no diminution in the plague yet, that we can discern. Two of the men we had helping to take Major T----'s things from the water are attacked; one of them is the fourth from a house, consisting of six. The remaining servant of Mr. T---- had intelligence brought while I was there, that his aunt was dead, which, he says, is the eighth near relation he has lost.