of business, they suffered for a while from poverty as well as disease.  A large and airy house at Bush-hill, about a mile from the city, was opened for their reception.  This house, after it became the charge of a committee appointed by the citizens on the 14th of September, was regulated and governed with the order and cleanliness of an old and established hospital.  An American and French physician had the exclusive medical care of it after the 22d of September.

The contagion, after the second week in September, spared no rank of citizens.  Whole families were confined by it.  There was a deficiency of nurses for the sick, and many of those who were employed were unqualified for their business.  There was likewise a great deficiency of physicians, from the desertion of some and the sickness and death of others.  At one time there were only three physicians able to do business out of their houses, and at this time there were probably not less than six thousand persons ill with the fever.

During the first three or four weeks of the prevalence of the disorder, I seldom went into a house the first time without meeting the parents or children of the sick in tears.  Many wept aloud in my entry or parlor, who came to ask advice for their relations.  Grief after a while descended below weeping, and I was much struck in observing that many persons submitted to the loss of relations and friends without shedding a tear, or manifesting any other of the common signs of grief.

A cheerful countenance was scarcely to be seen in the city for six weeks.  I recollect once, on entering the house of a poor man, to have met a child of two years old that smiled in my face.  I was strangely affected with this sight (so discordant to my feelings and the state of the city), before I recollected the age and ignorance of the child.  I was confined the next day by an attack of the fever, and was sorry to hear, upon my recovery, that the father and mother of this little creature died a few days after my last visit to them.

The streets every-where discovered marks of the distress that pervaded the city.  More than one-half the houses were shut up, although not more than one-third of the inhabitants had fled into the country.  In walking, for many hundred yards, few persons were met, except such as were in quest of a physician, a nurse, a bleeder, or the men who buried the dead.  The hearse alone kept up the remembrance of the noise of carriages or carts in the streets.  Funeral processions were laid aside.  A black man leading or driving a horse, with a corpse on a pair of chair-wheels, with now and then half a dozen relations or friends following at a distance from it, met the eye in most of the streets of the city, at every hour of the day, while the noise of the same wheels passing slowly over the pavements, kept alive anguish and fear in the sick and well, every hour of the night.

The population of Philadelphia at this time was but sixty thousand, and the reader will see that a loss of four thousand was a heavy percentage for so short a period.