Though a period of seventeen years separated the first cholera epidemic from the second, the lessons which the former should have taught had not been so well learned as they should have been, and the latter, with which these reminiscences are chiefly concerned, inspired a wild, unreasoning terror in only a little less degree than that of 1832. I remember a case at Mitcham, in which the women attending a patient were seized with a panic on the approach of death, and rushed out of the house, leaving the poor wretch, a woman, to die alone, the corpse being afterwards found rigid and distorted. The apparently erratic manner in which the disease spread, sometimes carrying off victims from one side of a street and sparing the other side, sometimes smiting every member of a family in one house, and passing over all the other houses in the same street, was a puzzle to persons who had given no attention to the causes of the disease, and were content to regard it as a sign of the wrath of God, reasoning about the matter as little as did the Israelites whose relatives were swept off at Kibroth-hattaavah. They had not given sufficient attention to the laws of health to understand that the disease found its victims where those laws were neglected, whether from carelessness or from ignorance. I remember two cases at Croydon in which all the inmates of the houses in which the disease manifested its dread presence were carried off by it. One occurred in a cottage in St. James's Road, one of a row which had originally been level with the road, but had become overshadowed by the approach to the railway bridge. There were three victims in that house, and no other case in the same row, or in the neighbourhood. The other case occurred in King Street, one of several narrow, closely-built streets in the centre of the town, and the victims were a widow and her only child, the latter dying not alone, for, like Byron's Haidee,-- "----she held within A second principle of life, which might Have dawned a fair and sinless child of sin; But closed its little being without light, And went down to the grave unborn, wherein Blossom and bough lie withered with one blight."