The houses in Norfolk are about five hundred in number; by far the greater part of them are of wood, and but meanly built. These have all been erected since the year 1776, when the town was totally destroyed by fire, by the order of Lord Dunmore, then regal governor of Virginia. The losses sustained on that occasion were estimated at £.300,000 sterling. Towards the harbour the streets are narrow and irregular; in the other parts of the town they are tolerably wide; none of them are paved, and all are filthy; indeed, in the hot months of summer, the stench that proceeds from some of them is horrid. That people can be thus inattentive to cleanliness, which is so conducive to health, and in a town where a sixth part of the people died in one year of a pestilential disorder, is most wonderful!![22] Footnote 22: The yellow fever, which has committed such dreadful ravages of late years in America, is certainly to be considered as a sort of plague. It first appeared at Philadelphia in the year 1793; in 1794 it appeared at Baltimore; in 1795, at New York and Norfolk; and in 1796, though the matter was hushed up as much as possible, in order to prevent an alarm, similar to that which had injured the city so much the preceding year, yet in New York a far greater number of deaths than usual were heard of during the summer and autumn, strongly supposed to have been occasioned by the same malignant disorder. The accounts given of the calamitous consequences attendant upon it, in these different places, are all much alike, and nearly similar to those given of the plague:—The people dying suddenly, and under the most shocking circumstances—such as were well flying away—the sick abandoned, and perishing for want of common necessaries—the dead buried in heaps together without any ceremony—charity at an end—the ties of friendship and consanguinity disregarded by many—others, on the contrary, nobly coming forward, and at the hazard of their own lives doing all in their power to relieve their fellow citizens, and avert the general woe.——At Philadelphia, in the space of about three months, no less than four thousand inhabitants were swept off by this dreadful malady, a number, at that time, amounting to about one tenth of the whole. Baltimore and New York did not suffer so severely; but at Norfolk, which is computed to contain about three thousand people, no less than five hundred fell victims to it.