Page:Early western travels, 1748-1846 V13.djvu/321

 renders probable. This palm, which grows in Orleans street, has attained the height of more than 30 feet, with a trunk of near 18 inches in diameter, and has flowered annually for the space of several years. The period of inflorescence appears to be about the commencement of April, but being only a staminiferous plant, it has not consequently produced any fruit.

That fatal epidemic, the yellow fever, was last summer unusually prevalent, and carried off probably 5 or 6000 individuals, a great part of whom were, as usual, emigrants from the northern states, and different parts of Europe. By what I can learn, the hospital in this place is very ill suited to the recovery of those patients who are hurried to it during the rage {244} of this disease. They are crowded almost to contact; so that the contagion acquires force and fatality in the very institution formed for its recovery. Many, however, flock to this last refuge for the indigent and miserable, in a state which precludes all hopes of recovery.

The expense of medical assistance, the difficulty of obtaining attendance, and the selfish and fearful supineness which seizes upon all classes at this awful season, serves to increase the fatal gloom which surrounds the unhappy stranger, thus often inhumanly abandoned by all society, and left, before the approach of the fatal moment, like a carcase to the vultures!

The scene of crowded graves which appals the eye in the general burying-ground, marked by boards, or covered tombs, inscribed with mournful remembrances; the hosts which are swept off, also, interred in forgotten crowds, and consigned to relentless oblivion, appeared thickly to chequer the whole surface of the earth, and warn the stranger, in no ambiguous phrase, of the fatal climate in