The filibusters finally degenerated into pirates and robbers, and the treasure ships ("galleons") of Spain, and the towns upon her American coasts, were the victims of their depredations. The fury of the buccaneers was mainly directed against the monks, and when they sacked a town, they never failed to pay an especial visitation to the convents. When Vera Cruz was sacked they showed their contempt for the clergy by compelling the monks and nuns to carry the plunder of the town to their private boats; thereby grieving these "holy men" most of all, if we may believe the old chronicles, because they could have no share in the rich plunder loaded upon their own backs. The second day after our arrival in Vera Cruz a fellow-passenger, who had been sick all the voyage, died of the yellow fever, which he had contracted at New Orleans, or on the Mississippi; which was probably the first time that a person ever died in Vera Cruz of vomito that had been contracted in the United States. THE VOMITO. This is a fitting place to speak of this disease and of its ravages, which we witnessed before leaving New Orleans. It was the time for the frosts to make their appearance when I left New York, and with the expectation of seeing the ground covered with this antidote to the fever, crowds were returning from the north, though the marks of the pestilence were still visible along our route. It had followed the main stream of travel far northward, and now, as we ventured upon its track, it seemed like traversing the valley of the shadow of death. Terror had committed greater ravages than the pestilence; the villages and cities on our route were half deserted; stagnation was visible in all commercial places; and when we reached New Orleans this strange state of things was doubly intensified: it looked more like a city of the dead, or a city depopulated, than the emporium of the Mississippi valley. A stranger might have supposed that a great funeral service had just been performed, in which all of the inhabitants remaining in town had acted the part of mourners. The city itself had been so thoroughly cleansed, that it might challenge comparison with one of the most cleanly villages of Holland, while its footways seemed almost too pure to be trod upon. Nothing appears half so gloomy as such a place when deserted of its principal inhabitants.