I believe I have never been so badly situated before as I have been during these last four weeks. To begin with, the time-hallowed and business-worn thunderbolt out of the clear sky fell about the 18th of August--people in Hamburg dying like flies of something resembling cholera! A normal death rate of forty a day suddenly transformed into a terrific daily slaughter without notice to anybody to prepare for such a surprise! Certainly that was recognizable as that kind of a thunderbolt. It was at this point that the oddity of the situation above referred to began. For you will grant that it is odd to live four weeks a twelve-hour journey from a devastating plague nest and remain baffled and defeated all that time in all your efforts to get at the state of the case there. Naturally one flies to the newspapers when a pestilence breaks out in his neighborhood. He feels sure of one thing, at any rate: that the paper will cast all other interests into the background and devote itself to the one supreme interest of the day; that it will throw wide its columns and cram them with information, valuable and otherwise, concerning that great event; and that it will even leave out the idle jaunts of little dukes and kinglets to make room for the latest plague item. I sought the newspapers, and was disappointed. I know now that nothing that can happen in this world can stir the German daily journal out of its eternal lethargy. When the Last Day comes it will note the destruction of the world in a three-line paragraph and turn over and go to sleep again. This sort of journalism furnishes plenty of wonders. I have seen ostensible telegrams from Hamburg four days old, gravely put forth as news, and no apology offered. I have tracked a news item from one paper to another day after day until it died of old age and fatigue--and yet everybody treated it with respect, nobody laughed. Is it believable that these antiquities are forwarded by telegraph? It would be more rational to send them by slow freight, because less expensive and more speedy. Then, the meagerness of the news meal is another marvel. That department of the paper is not headed “Poverty Column,” nobody knows why. We know that multitudes of people are being swept away daily in Hamburg, yet the daily telegrams from there could be copied on a half page of note paper, as a rule. If any newspaper has sent a special reporter thither he has not arrived yet. The final miracle of all is the character of this daily dribble of so-called news. The wisest man in the world can get no information out of it. It is an Irish stew made up of unrelated odds and ends, a mere chaotic confusion and worthless. What can one make out of statistics like these: Up to noon, 655 cases, 333 deaths. Of these 189 were previously reported. The report that 650 bodies are lying unburied is not true. There are only 340, and the most of these will be buried to-night. There are 2,062 cases in the hospitals, 215 deaths.