from Ireland; I gave him his degree in a few weeks, and he kept school somewhere out on the prairie.  The other did not graduate before the cholera came.  He was a native of Vermont, and he played the clarionet in our church choir.  The instrumental music came from the clarionet, from a violin, and a flute.  The choir came from France and Germany, Old England and New England, Ireland, Alsace, and Belgium.  It was divided into two hostile camps, and the party which first took possession of the gallery took precedence in the music for that day only.  There was a want of harmony.  One morning when the priest was chanting the first words of the Gloria, the head of a little French bugler appeared at the top of the gallery stairs, and at once started a plaint chant, Gloria, we had never rehearsed or heard before.  He sang his solo to the end.  He was thirsting for glory, and he took a full draught.

I don’t think there was ever a choir like ours but one, and that was conducted by a butcher from Dolphinholm in the Anglican Church at Garstang.  One Sunday he started a hymn with a new tune.  Three times his men broke down, and three times they were heard by the whole congregation whispering ferociously at one another.  At length the parson tried to proceed with the service, and said:  “Let us pray.”  But the bold butcher retorted:  “Pray be hanged.  Let us try again, lads; I know we can do it.”  He then started the hymn for the fourth time, and they did it.  After the service the parson demanded satisfaction of the butcher, and got it in a neighbouring pasture.

The cholera came, and we soon grew very serious.  The young man from Vermont walked with me after school hours, and we tried to be cheerful, but it was of no use.  Our talk always reverted to the plague, and the best way to cure it or to avoid it.  The doctors disagreed.  Every theory was soon contradicted by facts; all kinds of people were attacked and died; the young and the old, the weak and the strong, the drunken and the sober.  Every man adopted a special diet or a favourite liquor—­brandy, whiskey, bitters, cherry-bounce, sarsaparilla.  My own particular preventive was hot tea, sweetened with molasses and seasoned with cayenne pepper.  I survived, but that does not prove anything in particular.

The two papers, the ‘Joliet Signal’ and the ‘True Democrat’, scarcely ever mentioned the cholera.  It would have been bad policy, tending to scare away the citizens and to injure trade.

Many men suddenly found that they had urgent business to look after elsewhere, and sneaked away, leaving their wives and families behind them.

On Sunday Father Ingoldsby advised his people to prepare their souls for the visit of the Angel of Death, who was every night knocking at their doors.  There were many, he said, whose faces he had never seen at the rails since he came to Joliet; and what answer would they give to the summons which called them to appear without delay before the judgment seat of God?  What doom could they expect but that of damnation and eternal death?