I shall pass hurriedly over the sad story of its ravages. Were I to dwell on it to the extent of my information, and I know only a little of the whole, the reader might think I was misanthropically accumulating into one gloomy heap all that is terrible in the judgments of God, and all that is mean and feeble in the character of man. The pangs of the rack, the boot, the thumbscrew--all that the Dominican or the savage has inflicted on the heretic or the white man, were realized in the tortures of this dreadful disease. Utter debility, intense thirst, excruciating cramps of the limbs, and an unimpaired intellect, were its chief characteristics. And the last was not the least terrible. Amid the ruins of the body, from which it was so soon to part, the melancholy spirit looked back upon the past with regret, and on the future with terror. Or even if the sufferer amid his fierce pain “laid hold on the hope that faileth not;” with what feelings must he have looked around the deserted cottage, when the friends in whom he had trusted proved unfaithful--or, more melancholy still, on the affectionate wife or the dutiful child struck down by the bedside in agonies as mortal as his own. In the villages of Ross the disease assumed a more terrible aspect than it had yet presented in any other part of Britain. In the little village of Portmahomack one-fifth of the inhabitants were swept away; in the still smaller village of Inver, one-half. So abject was the poverty of the people, that in some instances there was not a candle in any house in a whole village; and when the disease seized on the inmates in the night-time, they had to grapple in darkness with its fierce agonies and mortal terrors, and their friends, in the vain attempt to assist them, had to grope round their beds. The infection spread with frightful rapidity. At Inver, though the population did not much exceed a hundred persons, eleven bodies were committed to the earth, without shroud or coffin, in one day; in two days after they had buried nineteen more. Many of the survivors fled from the village, and took shelter, some in the woods, some among the hollows of an extensive tract of sandhills. But the pest followed them to their hiding-places, and they expired in the open air. Whole families were found lying dead on their cottage floor. In one instance, an infant, the only survivor, lay grovelling on the body of its mother--the sole mourner in a charnel-house of the pestilence. Rows of cottages, entirely divested of their inhabitants, were set on fire and burned to the ground. The horrors of the times of Peter Walker were more than realized. Two young persons, a lad and his sister, were seen digging a grave for their father in the churchyard of Nigg; and then carrying the corpse to it on a cart, no one venturing to assist them. The body of a man who died in a cottage beside the ferry of Cromarty, was borne to a hole, hurriedly scooped out of a neighbouring sand-bank, by his brother and