“‘Ah, monsieur!’ said he, ‘do you not feel the sirocco?’

    “’Sirocco or not, is this a reason why no one should come when
    I call?’

    “‘Oh, monsieur, when it is sirocco no one does any thing!’

    “‘And your travellers, who is to wait upon them?’

    “‘On those days they wait upon themselves.’

“I begged pardon of this respectable official for having disturbed him; he heaved such a sigh as indicated that it required a great amount of Christian charity to grant the pardon I had asked.

“The hour arrived when the doctor should have paid his visit, and no doctor came.  I presumed that the sirocco detained him also; but as the state of Jadin appeared to me alarming, I resolved to go and rouse my Esculapius, and bring him, willing or unwilling, to the hotel.  I took my hat and sallied forth.

“Messina had the appearance of a city of the dead:  not an inhabitant was walking in the streets, not a head was seen at the windows.  The mendicants themselves (and he who has not seen the Sicilian mendicant, knows not what wretchedness is,) lay in the corners of the streets, stretched out, doubled up, panting, without strength to stretch out their hand for charity, or voice to ask an alms.  Pompeii, which I visited three months afterwards, was not more silent, more solitary, more inanimate.

    “I reached the doctor’s.  I rang, I knocked, no one answered.  I
    pushed against the door, it opened;—­I entered, and pursued my
    search for the doctor.

“I traversed three or four apartments.  There were women lying upon sofas, and children sprawling on the floor.  Not one even raised a head to look at me.  At last, in one of the rooms, the door of which was, like the rest, half-open, I found the man I was in quest of, stretched upon his bed.

    “I went up to him, I took him by the hand, and felt his pulse.

    “‘Ah,’ said he, with a melancholy voice, and scarcely turning
    his head towards me, ‘Is that you?  What can you want?’

    “’Want!—­I want you to come and see my friend, who is no
    better, as it seems to me.’

    “‘Go and see your friend!’ cried the doctor, in a
    fright—­’impossible!’

    “‘Why impossible?’

“He made a desperate effort to move, and taking his cane in his left hand, passed his right hand slowly down it, from the golden head that adorned it to the other extremity.  ‘Look you,’ said he, ‘my cane sweats.’

    “And, in fact, there fell some globules of water from it, such
    an effect has this terrible wind even on inanimate things.

    “‘Well,’ said I, ‘and what does that prove?’

    “’That proves, that at such a time as this, there are no
    physicians, all are patients.[3]’”—­P. 175.