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CHAPTER VIII.
AFTER a long interval, I am again impelled by the restless spirit within me
to continue my narration; but I must alter the mode which I have hitherto
adopted. The details contained in the foregoing pages, apparently trivial,
yet each slightest one weighing like lead in the depressed scale of human
afflictions; this tedious dwelling on the sorrows of others, while my own
were only in apprehension; this slowly laying bare of my soul's wounds:
this journal of death; this long drawn and tortuous path, leading to the
ocean of countless tears, awakens me again to keen grief. I had used this
history as an opiate; while it described my beloved friends, fresh with
life and glowing with hope, active assistants on the scene, I was soothed;
there will be a more melancholy pleasure in painting the end of all. But
the intermediate steps, the climbing the wall, raised up between what was
and is, while I still looked back nor saw the concealed desert beyond, is a
labour past my strength. Time and experience have placed me on an height
from which I can comprehend the past as a whole; and in this way I must
describe it, bringing forward the leading incidents, and disposing light
and shade so as to form a picture in whose very darkness there will be
harmony.
It would be needless to narrate those disastrous occurrences, for which a
parallel might be found in any slighter visitation of our gigantic
calamity. Does the reader wish to hear of the pest-houses, where death is
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