Happily for the honor of human nature, there are always, in times like these, great souls whom base panic cannot prostrate.  A few brave physicians, a few faithful clergymen, a few high-minded citizens, a few noble women, remembered and practised what is due to humanity overtaken by a calamity like this.  On the 10th of September, a notice, without signature, appeared in the only paper published, stating that all but three of the Visitors of the Poor were sick, dead, or missing, and calling upon all who were willing to help to meet at the City Hall on the 12th.  From those who attended the meeting, a committee of twenty-seven was appointed to superintend the measures for relief, of whom Stephen Girard was one.  On Sunday, the 15th, the committee met; and the condition of the great hospital at Bush Hill was laid before them.  It was unclean, ill-regulated, crowded, and ill-supplied.  Nurses could not be hired at any price, for even to approach it was deemed certain death.  Then, to the inexpressible astonishment and admiration of the committee, two men of wealth and importance in the city offered personally to take charge of the hospital during the prevalence of the disease.  Girard was one of these, Peter Helm the other.  Girard appears to have been the first to offer himself.  “Stephen Girard,” records Matthew Carey, a member of the committee,

“sympathizing with the wretched situation of the sufferers at Bush Hill, voluntarily and unexpectedly offered himself as a manager to superintend that hospital.  The surprise and satisfaction excited by this extraordinary effort of humanity can be better conceived than expressed.”

That very afternoon, Girard and Helm went out to the hospital, and entered upon their perilous and repulsive duty.  Girard chose the post of honor.  He took charge of the interior of the hospital, while Mr. Helm conducted its out-door affairs.  For sixty days he continued to perform, by day and night, all the distressing and revolting offices incident to the situation.  In the great scarcity of help, he used frequently to receive the sick and dying at the gate, assist in carrying them to their beds, nurse them, receive their last messages, watch for their last breath, and then, wrapping them in the sheet they had died upon, carry them out to the burial-ground, and place them in the trench.  He had a vivid recollection of the difficulty of finding any kind of fabric in which to wrap the dead, when the vast number of interments had exhausted the supply of sheets.  “I would put them,” he would say, “in any old rag I could find.”  If he ever left the hospital, it was to visit the infected districts, and assist in removing the sick from the houses in which they were dying without help.  One scene of this kind, witnessed by a merchant, who was hurrying past with camphored handkerchief pressed to his mouth, affords us a vivid glimpse of this heroic man engaged in his sublime vocation.  A carriage, rapidly