You see by the papers, I presume, the official accounts of the cholera in Paris. It seems very terrible to you, no doubt, at your distance from the scene, and truly it is terrible enough, if one could realize it, anywhere; but many here do not trouble themselves about it, and you might be in this metropolis a month, and if you observed the people only, and frequented only the places of amusement, and the public promenades, you might never suspect its existence. The weather is June-like, deliciously warm and bright; the trees are just in the tender green of the new buds, and the public gardens are thronged all day with thousands of the gay and idle, sitting under the trees in groups, laughing and amusing themselves, as if there were no plague in the air, though hundreds die every day. The churches are all hung in black; there is a constant succession of funerals; and you cross the biers and hand-barrows of the sick, hurrying to the hospitals at every turn, in every quarter of the city. It is very hard to realize such things, and, it would seem, very hard even to treat them seriously. I was at a masque ball at the _Théatre des Varietés_, a night or two since, at the celebration of the _Mi-Careme_, or half-Lent. There were some two thousand people, I should think, in fancy dresses, most of them grotesque and satirical, and the ball was kept up till seven in the morning, with all the extravagant gaiety, noise, and fun, with which the French people manage such matters. There was a _cholera-waltz_, and a _cholera-galopade_, and one man, immensely tall, dressed as a personification of the _Cholera_ itself, with skeleton armor, bloodshot eyes, and other horrible appurtenances of a walking pestilence. It was the burden of all the jokes, and all the cries of the hawkers, and all the conversation; and yet, probably, nineteen out of twenty of those present lived in the quarters most ravaged by the disease, and many of them had seen it face to face, and knew perfectly its deadly character!