CHOLERA-TIMES IN BANGKOK.
Those indeed were dreadful days in the summer
of 1849, when, after being free from it
thirty years, cholera again broke out in Siam;
when in less than a fortnight more than twenty
thousand people perished in the one city of Bangkok;
when, go where you would in the streets,
you would meet men carrying their dead slung
from a bamboo borne on the shoulders of two of
them; when hundreds of corpses were thrown
into the river and heaps on heaps were piled
up like logs and burned to get them out of the
way.
I need not say that the Siamese were very much frightened when this dreadful disease broke out among them. They saw their friends and neighbors sicken in an hour and dying on their right hand and left in almost every house, and each one feared it might be his turn next. But where did they look for help? Did the king proclaim a fast-day, think you? and the people repent of their many sins and pray to God to have mercy on them? Alas! God was
