Georgetown, A City of the Dead. 
211 
exaggerated. Wliat an absolutely different appearance the city now 
presented to what it previously offered when, sparkling with Life and 
Luxury, the must rousing animation was astir! A gloomy oppressive 
silence had overspread the place, and instead of shining phaetons and 
gigs, sombre hearses alone occupied the quietened streets. As is the 
custom in England these were decorated with huge plumes of ostrich 
feathers, the white colour of which indicated that a maid or child rested 
in the coffin. The friends and dependents of the deceased in slow and 
silent procession accompanied the mourning- carriages to the last resting- 
place, but without sinking in the vault with their beloved dead those 
distinctions by which human pride divides the living: the Europeans only 
follow the European departed, the coloured folks only the coloured one, 
the Negroes but the Negro. 
673. The salvoes, repeated several times a day, that rolled over the 
city from the Garrison cemetery nearby, shewed that the epidemic of 
Yellow Fever was also raging in the Military Hospital. Tlds last 
honour was paid to every soldier, even though he had gone through no 
campaign. It was only the poor sailor, dying from the pestilence in 
the Seaman’s Hospital, who was laid to rest under the cool decking of 
the grave in a plain coffin, without any showy hearse and attended by 
no one. Sailors still free from the disease, for instance, were not allowed 
to leave their ship and follow the recent companions of their joys and 
sorrows, their former fellow travellers in storm and shine, to the safe 
anchorage of everlasting rest. The lovely figures and sparkling eyes 
had disappeared from the Ring, while the Promenade on the water-front 
mourned in silence and neglect, although the palms still rustled just as 
mysteriously as before, and the thousands of flowers continued to fill the 
atmosphere with their fragrance. The whole sight vividly recalled to 
mind the time when cholera broke out in Berlin and spread its dismal 
crape over the equally lively city of the Linden trees. The scourge was 
still claiming many of our friends, several of whom we never saw again. 
674. The fever wrought the most terrible havoc amongst the first 
battalion of the 52nd Regiment, the sailors, and the immigrant Portu- 
guese. The first mentioned lost in a short time 80 N.C.O.’s and men, and 
four officers on which account it was transferred, immediately after our 
arrival, to Berbice: of the sailors upon the few ships that lay in the 
harbour 62 had already succumbed to the disease, while among the Por- 
tuguese six out of every ten attacked always died, with the result that 
out of a population of 23,000 individuals, sixteen deaths on an average 
occurred daily. It was during this period that, were one to cross the 
threshold, he would see plenty of people who— suddenly seized by the 
complaint, and unable to reach their homes, — would be lying helpless on 
the pavement, until the Sanitary Police found them and had them con- 
veyed to Hospital : I was repeatedly witness of awful scenes of this 
description. 
675. Small-pox to which so many, particularly Negroes, fell a victim, 
raged in such ghastly association with this Destroying Angel that the 
