The Pasha of Broussa was informed by his family physician that his _Chiboukjhe_, or pipe-bearer, who had been in his service from his boyhood, and to whom he was much attached, had discovered symptoms of plague, which would render it necessary for his Excellency to take such precautions as might tend to ensure the safety of the other members of his family; and accordingly he gave immediate orders for the removal of the harem to a village in the mountains; and ordered all the linen of the inmates of the salemliek to be washed, and their woollen clothing carefully aired and fumigated, ere it was transported thither, together with the male members of his establishment. The Chiboukjhe, hearing of the intended removal of the household, begged to see his master once more ere he left the city; and the Pasha complied with his request without scruple, as a couple of yards intervening between the plague-patient and his visitor are sufficient to prevent contagion. But the kind-hearted Pasha had not calculated upon his own powers of resistance; and, when the favourite domestic upbraided him with his cruelty in leaving him to die alone, and recalled to his memory a score of circumstances in which he had proved his attachment and devotedness to the welfare of his master; the Pasha, with a recklessness perfectly incomprehensible, ordered that fresh linen should be put upon the patient: that his own garments should be destroyed and replaced by new ones; and that he should be forthwith comfortably placed in an araba, and conveyed to the village whither all the rest of the establishment had been previously removed. The order was obeyed; and the infected man arrived on the evening of the second day at the mountain-retreat, bringing with him the deadly disease which was rapidly sapping his life-blood. Four-and-twenty hours had not elapsed when the favourite wife of the Pasha, a beautiful girl of sixteen, expired, in a fit of raging madness, upon her cushions: the pestilence had wrought so rapidly in her young and delicate frame that no time had been afforded for precaution or help; the weak blindness of the Pasha had sacrificed his wife, compromised his house, and endangered the whole family. He rushed from one apartment to another like a maniac, but the bolt had fallen; and at midnight his youngest child lay a corpse on its dead mother’s bosom. They were buried hurriedly beneath the tall trees of the garden; and the earth was but newly scattered over their graves when another of the Pasha’s wives breathed her last—Suffice it that in the space of ten days, out of a harem consisting of nineteen persons, there remained only an aged negress and two infant children; while the salemliek had also suffered severely, although not in the same proportion.