There is, to me, something frightful in the terror with which, in a season of virulent pestilence, each individual avoids all human contact, and looks upon his best friends as vehicles of destruction.—In the shrinking of relatives from each other, and the unwonted selfishness of usually free and generous spirits. Nor is the sensation a comfortable one, with which you remember that you are yourself considered as infected, and treated with distrust accordingly; and in moments of depression find yourself speculating in your own mind the probability of the fear being well-grounded. Does your head ache?—It is a symptom of plague—Are you sick and faint from heat?—It is even thus that the pestilence frequently declares itself in the first instance—If you take cold upon the Bosphorus, you have laid the corner-stone of the malady—and over-fatigue may induce the exhaustion which lends strength to the incipient evil. It is impossible to describe the effect of this continual necessity for caution: but even this is trifling beside the constant dread of contact with infection. It is vain to affect a mad courage leading you to set at defiance these accumulated dangers; there are moments when an unconquerable dread will creep over the heart, and sicken the spirit. There are many who do not fear death; but they are habituated to associate it in their minds with an accustomed home, and watching friends, and anxious tenderness; all accessories tending to soften the pang of disease, and to smooth the path of dissolution—Few are they who could contemplate calmly the death-hour of the plague-smitten—the hunted from his home—haunting the hills in his polluted solitude; and contaminating the pure air of Heaven by the fetid breathings of pestilence—shrieking out his madness to the mocking moon,—and dying in his despair on the bare earth; a loathsome thing, to which even a grave is sometimes denied! And yet, terrible as is the picture which I have drawn almost despite myself, it is surprising how little caution is observed by the Turks to escape from so direful a visitation. They have an absurd superstition that all True Believers who die, either by the hand of the Sultan, or by the visitation of the plague, go straight to Paradise, and to the arms of the Houri, without the intervention of any purgatorial quarantaine; and they account very satisfactorily for the infrequency of plague-cases among the Franks, by declaring that Allah does not love them sufficiently to grant them so desirable a privilege; without troubling themselves to remark the precautions taken by Europeans to prevent the spread of the disease, all of which are utterly neglected by the natives of the country. It is indeed astonishing how blindly the Orientals run the greatest risks, in the most unnecessary and apparently wilful manner.