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THE YELLOW FEVEE. 191 



"Upon the morning of the day the steamer lef c New York, on 

 which we had engaged our passage out, a gentleman startled us 

 a little by announcing that ''Nassau had got a black eye." He 

 said it had been reported in the States that the yellow fever had 

 broken out in Nassau, but that the Governor of the Bahamas and 

 the foreign consuls at Nassau had published cards denying tl^^',' 

 truth of the report. Our steamer stopped at Fernandina, and »^ 

 gentleman there told us that a physician, recently from Nassau, ^ 

 and then at the Egremont Hotel, in Fernandina, stated that be- 'h.i 

 fore he left there had been in Nassau two deaths from that dis- 

 ease. The steamer City of Austin had then just arrived at Fer- 

 nandina from Nassau, and one of its passengers assured us that 

 there was not any yellow fever in Nassau when he left. None 

 of our passengers were alarmed sufficiently to alter their plans, 

 and when upon the day of our arrival in Nassau we entered 

 the dining room of the Victoria Hotel, and saw how merry and 

 healthy and hungry everybody seemed to be, the last vestige of 

 the yellow fever scare disappeared. For some days no allusion 

 was made to "Yellow Jack," but after a while pretty well authen- 

 ticated reports reached us of quite a number of cases of sickness 

 and death within the city limits, but outside of the hotel. It 

 appears that the disease attacked at first the children of the 

 natives, some twenty or more of whom died. It was said that 

 it could not be yellow fever, first, because it was confined to the 

 children, and second, because none but children belonging in 

 Nassau had been attacked; whereas unacclimated adults were the 

 first to be stricken down when yellow fever prevails. 



After which we learned of a few cases of alarming sickness 

 among the visitors from the States and elsewhere, several of which 

 resulted in death. One of the latter was the wife of Dr. Aiken. 

 She was previously a healthy Avoman, but the doctor was an in- 

 valid. They had been boarding with a Nassau gentleman who 



