Page:Tale of Paraguay - Southey.djvu/171

Rh there can be no doubt that it has been a drop of nectar from the exuberant udders of the cows in England, and no way similar to the humour discharged from the tongue and feet of diseased cattle in this country."—Forbes's Oriental Memoirs, vol. iii. p. 423.

Canto I. St..

Mackenzie gives a dreadful picture of the effect of small-pox among the North American Indians.

"The small-pox spread its destructive and desolating power, as the fire consumes the dry grass of the field. The fatal infection spread around with a baneful rapidity, which no flight could escape, and with a fatal effect that nothing could resist. It destroyed with its pestilential breath whole families and tribes; and the horrid scene presented to those who had the melancholy and afflicting opportunity of beholding it, a combination of the dead, the dying, and such as, to avoid the horrid fate of their friends around them, prepared to disappoint the plague of its prey, by terminating their own existence.

"The habits and lives of these devoted people, which provided not to-day for the wants of to-morrow, must have heightened the pains of such an affliction, by leaving them not only without remedy, but even without alleviation. Nought was left them but to submit in agony and despair.