Many houses are deserted and from those which are not drift the fumes of preparations intended to protect the living still within. The streets are silent but for the faint wailing of the newly bereaved and the rumbling wheels of the melancholy death-carts hauling their loads to Potter’s Field. In one square alone I saw five of them, each at a different door. Here and there can be glimpsed one of the few brave doctors who remain to minister to the sick. They hurry from house to house, the black bag in one hand and a camphor-rag in the other which they press to their faces to ward off the contagion. The docks are quiet. No shipping comes up from the Narrows now, indeed I have heard it said that New York is finished as a seaport, so vulnerable are we to disease, being a crossroads for all the world. I see a skiff pushing off from the end of the wharf, a sail being run up, three children in the boat, two women, a few boxes. They are striking out for Long Island, intending to escape the contagion in those green fields.
