Bishop Bourget called upon the nuns to act as nurses. The Providence Sisters were the first approached, on June 24th. Each one answered simply, “I am ready.” Next morning twelve of these brave women were driven in carriages to the sheds. There they found hundreds of the sick crouched upon straw, wrestling in the agony of death; little children weeping in the arms of their dead mothers; women, themselves stricken, seeking for a beloved husband, amid a doleful chaos of suffering and evil odours. Other nuns were called out; even the enclosed Sisters of the Hôtel Dieu were allowed to leave their cloisters for the sad work of tending the dying and burying the dead in their hastily constructed, rude coffins of planks. Fifty or sixty died each day and their bodies, awaiting burial, were placed in an immense charnel house erected on the river banks. In this were some that were buried alive. Many of the orphans were adopted in the city or cared for by the nuns. For this the Irish population of Montreal love the city with a personal love. Not only did the mayor die, but numerous others, physicians, clergy and nurses, and the police officers of the city. The events of 1848 include the flooding, on January 15th, of Wellington and Commissioners streets, and the run on the Savings Bank of the city on July 15th, which was shortly followed by a re-deposit. Educationalists will note the opening of the Jesuits’ College on September 20th in the improvised school at the corner of Alexander and Dorchester streets. The year 1849 was one of political turmoil already recorded, centering around the rebellion losses bill and resulting in the burning of the Parliament house and the removal of the seat of government from the city, a loss to its social life. An aspect of the burning of the Parliament house was that, with the political rancour there was mixed, in certain misguided quarters, a fanatical religious frenzy. It was planned to burn the “Grey Nuns,” near at hand, as well as the Jesuits’ residence and St. Patrick’s Church. The menaces came to nothing, owing to the guards of Irish watchers. Yet at the time, according to a letter written from Montreal in August, 1849, by the Jesuit Father Havequez to a friend in France, the Grey Nuns hard by were likely to become a prey to the fire “had not the brave Irish run to the rescue and succeeded, after extraordinary efforts, in mastering the flames.” The imposing public ceremony this year was the funeral, in the military cemetery on Papineau Road, of Sir Benjamin D’Urban, from whom Durban, in South Africa, bears its name, the charger of the deceased soldier being led through the streets in the procession by the groom, carrying the reversed boots of this companion of Wellington. It was long a remembered incident.