Not a tear, not a murmur escaped her, as she took her place beside his pillow, and entered upon her desperate office. In the paroxysms of his madness, as the poison was feeding upon his strength, and grappling at his brain, he spoke of her fondly—he talked to her—he stretched forth his arms to clasp her—and then he thrust her from him as he yelled out his agony, and his limbs writhed beneath the torture of the passing spasm. And she bore it all unshrinkingly; and even amid her misery she felt a thrill of joy as she discovered that pain and madness had alike failed to blot her image from his memory. But there were moments less cruel than these, in which reason resumed her temporary sway, and the devoted girl was pressed to the fevered bosom of her fated lover; and in these, brief as they were, she felt that she was over-paid for all. But the struggle even of youth and strength against the most baneful of all diseases could not last for ever—The patient expired in the arms of his devoted mistress; and as he breathed his last, bequeathed to her at once his dying smile, and the foul poison which was coursing through his veins. She saw him laid in his narrow grave; and then she turned away with the conviction that she, too, was plague-smitten! She did not return to her home: but she stood a few paces from one of the companions of her youth, and bade her bear to her aged parents her blessing and her prayers: and this done she fled to the mountains, and sought out a solitary spot wherein to die—None knew how long she lingered, for she was never seen again in life; but her body was found a few days afterwards beneath a ledge of earth, in a doubled-up position, as though the last spasm had been a bitter one. She who had sacrificed herself to smooth the last hours of him whom she had loved, perished alone, miserably, in the wild solitude of the Asian hills; and her almost Roman virtue has met with no other record than the brief one in which I have here attempted to perpetuate the memory of her devotion and her fate. It seems as though men apprehended contagion in the very name of the plague, for they have adopted terms that render its repetition needless. Should you inquire for a family which has become compromised, you are told that “they are gone to the mountains,” and you understand at once that they are infected; and when numbers are daily dying about you, in reply to your desire to learn the amount of the evil, you are answered that there are so many, or so many “accidents.” Every respectable house, and every public establishment, has in its court, or its outer hall, a small wooden erection, precisely like a sentry box raised on rollers, into which you are obliged to enter during a period of plague, before you are admitted into the interior of the building; and where you stand upon a latticed flooring, while aromatic herbs are burnt beneath, whose dense and heavy vapour soon envelops you in a thick smoke, which is said to prevent contagion.