THE PESTILENCE OF BAGDAD. Here lyeth, In hopes of a Blessed Ressurrection, the Body of LIEUT. FRANCIS MIDDLETON, September ye 11th, 1777, The other contains the following; MARY GIFFORD, Died, August 2nd, 1802, "She sleeps in Jesus." Before concluding, it may not be uninteresting to the reader to be informed that George Gifford was among those who were taken prisoners at the battle of the Brandywine that after suffering almost incredible privations, he was exchanged, and subsequently fought in some of the severest engagements of the war; and for his gallantry at the taking of Cornwallis at Yorktown, he was promoted to the rank of Major. At the close of the war, he took up his abode with his parents and sister, where, up to the time of our visit at his cottage in 1840, he still continued to reside-though they had long since passed to the land where partings and farewells are unknown. With deep feelings, he pointed out to us the solitary graves of Frank and Mary, and though more than sixty years had elapsed since the death of the former, his affection for his memory seemed undiminished. A few months ago, I heard of his death, and I have since learned that one of his latest requests was, that he might be buried on the green mound, by the side of his brother and sister. Hartford Ct. Columbian. JUDGE GASTON'S LAST WORDS. Few men in this country have been more esteemed for talent, learning, integrity and patriotism, than Judge Gaston of North Carolina, whose death at Raleigh was recently announced. A Southern paper gives the following beautiful and impressive sketch of the death bed scene of this excellent man: SONG. A DOZEN YEARS AGO. BY ARTHUR MORRELL. Do you still remember, Jane, The little ashful beau Who follow'd you through grove and lane, The little school house on the hill, To which we sauntered slow; The stream where flourish'd many a mill, Have you not forgotten yet How, often and again, The little blushing Jane? And then the flowers I chanced to have, A dozen years ago. Can I e'er forget those days, Those happy, peaceful hours, Then only trod the flowers? Who followed you through grove and lane, 405 THE PESTILENCE OF BAGDAD. THE following account of the condition of Bagdad, the ancient seat of the Caliphs, is given by Mr. Fraser, in his "Travels in Koordistan," and offers one of the most striking pictures ever presented of an Eastern town under the infliction of war, pestilence, inundation, and famine. The account refers to the years 1830-1, during the pashalic of Daood, whom the Sultan resolved to supplant in his government. Daood had long applied himself to the formation of an efficient army, and had succeeded so well that he might have laughed to scorn all the military array which the Sultan could have sent against him. Thus stood matters when, in the commencement of 1831, the plague, which had been desolating Persia, made its appearance in Bagdad. Insulated cases had occurred, it was said, so early as the preceding Movember, but they were concealed or neglected; and it was not until the month of March, 1831, that the fatal truth of the plague being in, and increasing in Bagdad, became notorious and undeniable. "His last words were in admirable keeping with the purity and piety of his long life. Surrounded by a few of his chosen friends, who were at his bed-side on the first intimation of a danger to which he was insensible, he was relating with great playfulness, the particulars of a convivial party at Washington city, many years ago, and spoke of one who on that occasion avowed himself a "free thinker" in religion. "From that day," said Judge Gaston, "I always looked on that man On the last day of March, Col. Taylor shut up his with distrust. I do not say that a free thinker may house, in accordance with the painful but necessary not be an honorable man; that he may not from high custom of the Europeans, who find, by experience, that motives scorn to do a mean act; but I dare not trust if this precaution be taken in time, they generally eshim. A belief in an over-ruling Divinity, who shapes cape the malady, which appears to be communicaour ends, whose eye is upon us, and who will reward ble only by contact, or close approach to leward of an us, according to our deeds, is necessary. We must infected person. On such occasions, all articles from believe and feel that there is a God-All wise-and" without are received through wickets cut in the wall, raising himself and seeming to swell with the thought and are never touched till passed through water. Meat, "ALMIGHTY!" There was a sudden rush of blood vegetables, money, all undergo this purifying process, to the brain. He sank in the arms of his friends-and and letters or papers are received by a long pair of iron in five minutes his spirit was gone! Not a struggle tongs, and fumigated before being touched by the hand. betokened its flight; not a groan pained the ear of his Well were it for the natives of the country if they could agonized friends. His body has gone to the dust; his be prevailed upon to submit to the same measures of spirit, we cannot doubt, now rests in the bosom of that precaution; the disease would then be robbed of half God Almighty whose name was last on his lips, and its terrors, and its victims greatly reduced in numbers; to whom he had long given the homage of a pure and but indolence and indifference, combined with a dim devout heart. belief in predestination, prevent them from effectual 406 THE PESTILENCE OF BAGDAD. accompany his party to Bussora, where, in a house in the country, sanguine hopes were entertained that they might avoid the contagion. Mr. Groves, however, on mature deliberation, declined availing himself of Colonel Taylor's friendly offer. The reverend gentleman had undertaken the care of a certain number of young persons, the children of Christian families of Bagdad; and motives of duty prevented him from taking a step which appeared to him like a desertion of his duty. He resolved to remain at his post; and putting his trust in that mighty Power which had sent the dreadful affliction, and who, he well knew, could save as well as destroy, he shut up his house, in which were twelve persons, including an American school-master and his family, and calmly awaited the issue. It is from this gentleman's journal that the best accounts of this dreadful period are to be collected; and from it, therefore, so far as the plague and inundation are concerned, I shall take the liberty of quoting occasionally, in the following short account of the condition of Bagdad. exertions; although the fact, that thousands fly from the city in hopes of escaping the pestilence which had penetrated into their dwellings, proves indisputably that their faith in fatalism is by no means firm or complete. In some cases this flight was made in time, and the fugitives escaped, though too often only to perish at another period and in another place. In others, they carried the disease with them, spreading its poison, and dying miserably in the desert. Even all the care observed by Europeans has sometimes been insufficient to preserve them from contagion. The virus is so subtle that the smallest possible contact suffices for communicating it, and the smallest animal serves to convey it. Cats, rates, and mice, are, for this reason, dangerous inmates or visitors: and cats in particular, as being more familiar with men, become more dreaded, and consequently are destroyed whenever they are seen by those who have faith in the value of seclusion. An instance of the fatal consequence of contact with such animals occurred in the house of a native Christian attached to the British Residency, who had the Colonel Taylor left Bagdad on the 12th of April. On good sense to follow the Resident's example in shut-the previous day, the number of deaths was understood ting up his house on a former occasion. A cat belong to amount to twelve hundred, and on that day it was ing to the family was touched by his eldest child, a girl ascertained that one thousand and forty deaths had of 14 or 15. The animal had neither been abroad itself, actually taken place on the east side of the river alone. nor received the visit of a neighbor, for the contact Next day, Mr. Groves had the pain of becoming aware brought the plague: the child took it and died of it. that the disease had entered the house of his next-door Poor thing! from the first moment she was aware of neighbor, where thirty persons had congregated, as if her danger and fate. for the very purpose of supplying it with victims. That same day, the report of deaths varied from one thousand to fifteen hundred, and that exclusive of the multitudes who died beyond the walls. On the succeeding day, the deaths increased to eighteen hundred; and so terrified were the survivors, that they scarcely could be prevailed upon to stay and bury their dead. Many prepared for the fate they anticipated, by pro It was, probably, by some such casual means that the disease was brought into Col. Taylor's house, although he and all its inmates conceived it to be almost hermetically sealed from its approaches. On the 10th of April a Sepoy died of it, and four of his servants were attacked. By this time the disease had made such progress that seven thousand persons had died of it in the eastern half of the city, which contains the resi-viding winding-sheets for themselves and family before dence of the Pasha, the British mission, and all the the increased demand should consume the whole supprincipal inhabitants. From the other side the ac-ply. Water also became scarce; for every water-carcounts were not less disastrous, and the distress of the inhabitants was further aggravated by the rise of the waters of the Tigris, which, having burst or overleaped the dams made upon its banks higher up, had inundated the low country to the westward, and even the town, where two thousand houses were already said to have been destroyed. Many who would have fled were prevented from doing so, not only by this spread of the waters, but by the Arabs, who had now congregated around the city, and who robbed and stripped rier, when stopped, replied that he was taking his load to wash the body of some dead person. [Washing the body being considered an indispensable funeral rite in Mahommedan countries.] naked all who came out of it. For several days together, about this time, that is, from the 16 to 20th or 21st of April, the mortality, so far as could be know, remained stationary at about two thousand a day; but many singularly distressing cases of individual distress occurred. In the family of one of Mr. Groves' little pupils, consisting of six persons, four were ill with the plague-the father and mother, Thus pent up, the pestilence had full play, and the a son and a daughter, leaving but one son and a daughpeople fell beneath it with incredible rapidity; and Col. ter untouched. Of the Pasha's regiments of seven Taylor, finding his own house, infested, had nothing|hundred men each, some had already lost five hunleft but to use the means in his power of flying, while dred; and the report from the neighborhood was still a possibility remained of so doing. His own boats, in worse than in town. The water, too, in the swollen which he and his family had come from Bussora, re- river, was fast increasing, and the danger of a total inmained always moored beneath the walls of the Resi-undation became every day more imminent. dency, and in a state of readiness for immediate service. In those he resolved to embark; and one great advantage was, that being in a manner confined to the precincts of the Residency, and so much raised by the heightened waters, that the deck of the yacht was on a level with the postern-door of the house, its inmates could make their preparations and get on board without being subjected to any foreign intercourse whatever. Matters being thus arranged, Col. Taylor invited the Rev. Mr. Groves, a missionary, with his family, to On the 23d, a little girl of 12 years old, was seen passing by with an infant in her arms; and on being asked whose it was, said she did not know; she had found it on the road and heard that its parents were dead. This was a very common effort of charity, especially on the part of the females, and not unfrequently proved fatal to them. An Armenian woman, who had come to beg for some sugar for an infant thus found, mentioned that a neighbor of hers had in the same manner rescued two, which she discovered thus aban THE PESTILENCE OF BAGDAD. doned in the street. Both these infants died, and were followed by their charitable protectress. Of all the painful incidents that attended the benevolent expeditions which Mr. Groves occasionally made from home, the sight of the number of infants thus exposed was the most distressing. ing till life was fled to begin their horrid feast,) united with the cries of the exposed miserable infants, formed a scene of horror which he avers-and no wonder can never be erased from his memory. 407 On the 25th, the fall of a wall in the Residency, from the sapping of the water, induced Mr. Groves again to visit that place. Not a soul did he meet in the streets, except those who carried dead bodies, and persons infected with the pestilence. One of the principal sellers of cotton for burying-clothes (who had taken advantage of the times to raise his prices exorbitantly) this day died himself. There was then no more of the stuff in the city. The price of rope, too, had become quadruple. Instead of formal burial, the bodies even of persons of considerable wealth were now just laid across the back of a mule or ass, and taken to a hole, attended, perhaps, by a single servant. During this frightful mortality around, the home Mr. Groves mentions the gesticulations of the few prospects of Mr. Groves and his family, although they Arab women whom he met on the way as particularly had hitherto been providentially exempted from actual striking; they seemed to demand of Heaven why disease, were sufficiently gloomy and distressing. Franks and infidels like him were suffered to live, while From the little passage opposite, they had seen twentyso many of the faithful died. The effect upon his five bodies carried out, and they knew of several permind was peculiarly startling and painful, surrounded sons being ill. In one of the houses, which had conas he was by the dead and the dying, the growling of tained eight inmates, only one remained alive; and in the dogs that were mangling the bodies (scarcely wait-like manner of another house hold of thirteen, but one The mortality, meantime, increased. On the 26th, it was affirmed at the serai that the deaths had reached five thousand in one day!-there seems no doubt that they exceeded four thousand, and this out of a population which at that time did not exceed fifty or sixty thousand; for at least one-third of the late inhabitants had, first and last, quitted the city. The water, too, had risen frightfully, and the anticipations in case of its breaking into the city, were terrible. Dreadful as they were, however, they were more than realized on the two following days. That night a large portion of the wall fell, and the water rushed in full tide into the city. The quarter of the Jews was speedily inundated, and two hundred houses fell at once. A part also of the wall of the citadel fell; nor was there much hope that any house or wall which the water had reached could stand, owing to the very dissolvable nature of the cement with which the greater part was built. By the following night, the whole lower part of the city was under water; and seven thousand houses are said to have fallen at one crash, burying the sick, the dying, and the dead, with those still in health, all in one common grave. sent to request the Resident's remaining boat that he might fly from the place; but of its crew, only one man was to be found alive; and even the Pasha could not find men to man her. "Fear of him is passed," says Mr. Groves, "and love for him there is none." Even in his own palace he was without power; death had been full as busy there as elsewhere; and that authority which was absolute in times of mere human agency, had sunk into nothing before the effects of an Almighty mandate. Out of one hundred Georgians that were about him, four only remained alive. All that could be done was to throw the dead out of the windows into the river, that they might not shock or infect the living. The stables of the palace, like the palace itself, fell in pieces, and all the Pasha's beautiful horses were running wild about the streets, where they were caught by any one who could, and most of them were sold to the Arabs. solitary individual survived. Nor were these by any means uncommon or singular cases. Of eighteen servants and Sepoys left by Col. Taylor in charge of the Residency, by the end of the month only four remained, and of these two were affected, and afterward died. There were five teachers of Arabic and Armenian connected with Mr. Groves' establishment, and every one of these died! Nor, with all this continued mortality, did the virulence of the disease abate, nor the number of daily deaths decrease. The remaining population crowded into smaller and smaller compass by the increasing inundation, presented, as it were, a more sure and deadly aim to the shafts of the pestilence. The influx of new inhabitants into infected houses, supplied fresh objects, and their dead remained poisoning the air in all the court-yards and areas, and literally encumbered the streets. Nor was this dreadful destruction of human life confined to the city. A large caravan for Damascus had left Bagdad at the commencement of the mortality; but it carried the deadly contagion along with it, and met, moreover, with an enemy scarcely less destructive in the inundation. They gained a comparatively elevated spot, where they remained pent up for three weeks, the water constantly gaining on them, and their numbers daily thinning. In the same manner a caravan of a thousand persons, who left Bagdad for The difficulty of obtaining provisions had now be- Hamauan, in Persia, carried their pestilence along with come extreme. Very respectable persons would now them, and lost more than half their number on the present themselves at the door to beg for some of the road. [The plague lasted till about the beginning of common necessaries. The number of the dead, too, May, when clear weather set in, and on the 26th day left in the streets, had increased to a frightful degree; of that month, it had disappeared. Melancholy was nor was there a possibility of removing them. This the scene to the survivors.] Of all the buildings of extremity of distress was shared to the full by the ru- Bagdad, there remained standing but a small knot upon ler of the smitten city. The serai of the Pasha was the banks of the river, where the ground was highest, by this time like the dwellings of most of his subjects with a mosque or two, the walls and foundations of -a heap of ruins, where he himself remained in the which had been more securely built than those of the utmost terror and perplexity. He declared to a ser- others; and even of those that did remain, scarce one vant of Mr. Groves that he knew not where to sleep had escaped damage. Even after the waters had subin safety. He dreaded every night being buried in the sided, houses continued to fall from the effect proruins of the remaining portion of his dwelling. Heduced on the materials, and from the sinking of the ground. Of the long lines of bazaars, many had shared the general wreck, and long it was before those that remained began to fill, and shops to open in any num. bers. Most of the merchants, and almost all the artificers were dead. Even now, if you require some article of manufacture, for which the place was formerly celebrated, the answer is-"Ah! you can't get that now, for all those that made it are dead of the plague." Whole trades were swept away, and it was sometime before the common necessaries of life, food and clo. thing, were to be had for the surviving population. ASTONISHING ACCURACY OF THE BIBLE. An astonishing feature of the word of God is, notwithstanding the time at which it alludes, there is not one physical error-not one assertion or allusion disproved by the progress of modern science. None of those mistakes which the science of each succeeding age discovered, in the books of the preceding; above all, none of those absurdities which modern astronomy indicates in such great numbers in the writings of the ancients in their sacred codes-in their philosophy, and even in the finest pages of the fathers of the church -not one of these errors is to be found in any of our sacred books. Nothing there will ever contradict that which, after so many ages, the investigation of the learned world have been able to reveal to us on the state of our globe, or on that of the Heavens. Peruse with care our Scriptures from one end to the other, to find there such spots, and, while you apply yourself to this examination, remember that it is a book which speaks of everything, which describes nature, which recites its creation, which tells us of the water, or the atmosphere, of the mountains, of the animals, and of the plants. It is a book which teaches us the first revolutions of the world, and which also foretells its last. It recounts them in the circumstantial language of history, it extols them in the sublimest strains of poetry, and it chants them in the charms of glowing song. It is a book which is full of oriental rapture, elevation, variety, and boldness. It is a book which speaks of the Heavenly and invisible world, while it also speaks of the earth and things visible. It is a book which nearly fifty writers of every degree of cultivation, of every state, of every condition and living through the course of fifteen hundred years, have concurred to make. It is a book which was written in the centre of Asia, in the sands of Arabia, and in the deserts of Judea; in the court of the temple of the Jews, in the music schools of the prophets of Bethel and Jericho, in the sumptuous palaces of Babylon, and on the idolatrous banks of Chebar; and, finally, in the centre of the Western civilization, in the mid of the Jews and of their ignorance, in the mid of polytheism and its idols, as also in the bosom of pantheism and its sad philosophy. It is a book whose first writer had been forty years a pupil of the magicians of Egypt, in whose opinion the sun, the stars, and the elements were endowed with intelligence, reacted on the elements, and govern. ed the world by a perpetual alluvium. It is a book which carries its narrations even to the hierarchies of angels-even to the most distant epochs of the future, and the glorious scenes of the last day. Well: search among its 50 authors, search among its 66 books, its 1,189 chapters, and its 31,713 verses, search for only one of those thousand errors which the ancients and moderns committed when they speak of the Heavens or of the earth-of their revolutions, of their elements; search-but you will find none.-From the German of Gaussen. THE STARRY HOME. THE greenwood wild, to the roving child, With its brake and deepened dell, With its fitful gleam in the pale moon-beam, Seems the work of magic spell. His pleasures here are found-no care He has seen the spring, and the young birds wing Their way to the tallest pine, Has watch'd their rest 'neath the mother's breast, Those scenes so dear of the greenwood here Soon would loose their solace mild; And while stars fly up with sparkling spring, He is waiting with hope when time shall bring The day he'll readily take his flight, To dwell in those realms of diamond light. The Spring is gone, and the Summer come, Fields wave high their golden sheen, And the harvest cheer of the ripening year Is spread on the village green. But he seeks the brook with anxious look, For his soul still longs to mount, And lists to the rill, while rippling shrill, For call from the fairy fount. But its gurgling note, though a pleasant sound, And the wind is cold and chill, And the garnered store on the well-threshed floor, But the child still seeks the grove, In praise of his greenwood love. And the cheerful hearth he seeks that night, Telling his mother, with proud delight, That ere the morrow shall dawn in day, In a starry home he'll be far away. She has laid him down in his russet gown, And his tabor pipe put by; The berries red hang o'er his head, But his eye's toward the sky; And his bed with leaves and strowen sheaves D. M. H. SEBAGO POND. thing was so calm that it seemed hardly possible to disturb the tranquility of the scene. The numerous SEBAGO POND. sert. DURING a journey through the eastern part of New England, in the May of 18—, I made a pedestrian ex-small craft of the fishermen were plying silently about cursion with an old college friend, from Portland to in pursuit of their sport; at intervals, a pleasure-boat Sebago Pond, a paradise of waters amid the wilderness would be seen containing a party with faces as bright of Maine. It was a glorious morning. We were in and joyous as the scenes amid which they were momotion and among the the fields, as all true pedestrians ving; and ever and anon the cry of the raftsmen from far up the lake, would come pealing over the waters, should be, in time to see the sun rising from the ocean, a thing of light and life, gladdening every living being making the whole appear like a festival day of the deand every feature of scenery into beauty and brightness at his approach. All nature seemed awakening at the summons of her master, and to be throwing off the veil of darkness which had hidden her beauties from his sight, and the dew drops around us were glittering in his beams, as if the elves, started at his approach, had fled, and in their haste left their jewels behind them to beautify and adorn the earth. A soft morning breeze was stirring and waving the grass by the road side, as if in harmony with its music. To a melancholy or a speculative man there is an undefinable pleasure in spring-time musings, and in the conversaWhoever has floated on the calm surface of a sumtions which grow out of them. The old year has passed away. The tempests of winter have sunk and died mer lake, may imagine or recollect the happiness of before the softening and perhaps enervating influence the moment. The water around and beneath as clear of spring, and, as if in unison with nature, the invalid and as smooth as polished glass, the trees and cliffs who has lingered on in life, during the severity of our and headlands pictured in its depths by the bright sun, northern climate, and who has, during its dreariness, and the sun himself in his glory, with all the blue firbaffled for a while the slow inroads of consumption, mament around him, reflected from the wave with a brightens at the return of spring, with the hectic colors softness which the eye can bear, and with a magnifi"that dazzle as they fall," and at last sinks into his cence only equaled by the intolerable brightness of his grave just as the flowers have begun to bloom and blos-real presence in the sky. We seemed to be in the midst som around him. We soon procured a boat and a boatman, and commenced, in compliance with the custom of all the visitors of Sebago, trailing our lines amid scores of others. Ah! old Izaak Walton, thou wouldst never more have hung over the narrow streams of old England, couldst thou once have gazed into the clear depths of this beauteous lake; couldst thou have reclined with thy rod and thy basket and spent the livelong day in "meditation and angling" on its banks, and have seen the noble fish sporting in its waters, as if proud of their spacious habitation. of a vast circle, extending beneath, above and around, With good company, walking, is, for a while, a most as far as the eye reached and the horizon extended; excellent means of getting along and enjoying the way- the centre of a vast globe of earth, and sky, and water, faring amusement of the traveler. But solitary plea-over which two unclouded suns reigned together. At sures, let philosophers say what they will, are dull such a time, there is a deep hush over nature, which things. There is more truth than the world, or per- communicates itself to the mind. The very oarsman haps even the poets and rhymers who talk about them, will pause, though not from weariness, and in the proimagine, in what they say of the intercourse of tried found stillness, you will feel that breathlessness-that friends. When a man cannot have a vent for his per- rising of the heart, which is the effect of gazing on sipetually recurring thoughts, they will turn and prey lent sublimity. And then will come, stealing along, a upon his own mind, and render him a gloomy misan- gradual swell, under whose power your boat will rock, thrope. It is impossible to be forever thinking. Were and bend, and carry your body and mind with it in its it so, the brain would soon be filled, and leave no room every vibration, until it again sink to its motionless for fresh thick-coming fancies. During a walk of five repose. And then a breeze will sweep by, blending hours in the country every sense is continually convey-earth and water in whimsical forms, as in a distorting ing to us the materials for new thoughts, the bright-mirror, and ruffle the sunny water, making it appear ness and value of which are doubly increased by being like the folds of a flowing drapery. shared with another. As we moved along we gradually lost sight of our We in due time reached our destination. The ap- fellow laborers, and a more varied prospect of the lake proach to Sebago Pond is through a rugged, hilly land, began to open upon us. It is of a much softer and which opens a communication between the solitude of more delicate character than is the generality of our With one remarkable exception, the waters and the busy world around them. From eastern scenery. an elevation of the path there are suddenly seen a few there are none of the bold rough features so common fishing huts and raftsmen's cabins close beside a slight in New England. But at times would be seen a clearbridge, which is continually thronged with the most ing, filled with the charred stumps of the pines, whose patient of sportsmen. On the lower side of the bridge blackened surfaces and desolate cheerlessness, were the pond empties itself into a small river, which in its fit emblems of the ancient nobleness, withered and course to the sea, sets in motion the manufactories and blasted as it now is, of the rightful lords of the soil, machinery of a thickly settled country, while on the the American aborigines. At another point appeared other, the pond lies expanded to the view, "a burnish-young fields of grain in the bloom of vegetation, and ed sheet of living gold." We saw the water in its deep again our course would be altered by tracts of woodtranquility. I have seen it in storms, (for there are and stretching out into the water, while the little isstorms even upon our peaceful inland lakes,) when its lands with which the lake is studded, here a barren wooded islands would be dimly seen looming up like rock visited only by the wild fowl, and there a solitary spectres through the fog, and the waves would toss an- pine which seemed to be growing out of the water, grily about, as if vexed that their banks detained them served as marks to note our progress. from mingling with the ocean. But this day, every I have said that there was a remarkable exception |