There were great sadness and horror in Merida when notice was brought of the rapid, frequent, and painful deaths, which were taking place in Campeche, and which suggested the existence of the plague; the more so as an effort was made to minimize the reports of conditions. The pest, the sombre and frightful pest, which brings death as a daily thought to the minds of all; and not sweet and peaceful death, but the most distressing of all, death in solitude and abandonment! The stupor, caused by the news, did not prevent some measures of sanitation to prevent the invasion of the contagion, the principal of which was isolation. The city completely separated itself, closed the highways, set numerous guards in the roads, and all the inhabitants turned their eyes to God, imploring pity; the temples were thronged and deeds of mercy were more frequent and general. Nothing, however, sufficed to stay the advance of the disease; in turn, it attacked Merida, leaping over all the populations in the line of progress, and appearing in the city at the end of July. At first it attacked but few, here and there a person; although the number stricken did not cause a panic, the promptness with which they died struck terror. This, however, was but the beginning of the affliction; because, afterward, in the first days of August the disease increased above measure, and by the middle of the month almost all the inhabitants of the city were stretched upon the bed of pain by the contagion. Whole families were stricken and died in isolation, with no one to care for them or even to call a nurse, a physician, or a priest to give some aid. In the sad and deserted streets were only to be seen, passing like fugitive spectres, the secular clergy, the Jesuits, and the Franciscans in their long gowns, rapidly crossing from house to house to administer consolation to those dying who had the happiness to receive them; because, not infrequently, when the priests crossed the threshold of the house of death, they only encountered sepulchral stillness and corpses; at other times it happened that the priest, who bore the _viaticum_, was himself suddenly stricken with the disease and was obliged to lay himself down to die in the first doorway, while another priest came to take the holy elements from his hands, to continue the sacred task of abnegation and sacrifice. In the cathedral, in Santa Lucia, in San Cristobal, in Santiago, in San Sebastian, in Santa Catalina, the corpses were buried in the burying grounds near the churches; but so great was the crowd of the dead that the town government commanded new cemeteries to be opened and blessed in the fields; and, in order not to increase the panic, it ordered that the bodies should be carried to all these cemeteries at dawn, where a priest received them and repeated a prayer over them, and they were thrown into the common trench. That was a mournful spectacle, which those fields of