upon that day, in relation to Sierra Leone, so has it imposed upon ours, in relation to Cape Mesurado, and still more recently, to Cape Palmas. The deception is natural, though big with death. Enterprise and hope are elate in the human mind: the heart in such a frame is prepared for dreams of Eden. The beauty of the scenery; the richness and constant verdure of the trees; the deliciousness of the fruits; the coolness of the morning; the soul reviving freshness of the sea breeze; the almost unearthly sweetness of evening as it comes down, solemn, temperate, peaceful, a paradise refuge from the burning day; excite even in ordinary minds, almost the poet's rapture; and Sierra Leone, Cape Mesurado, Cape Palmas, are painted under the extasy. The mountains too, the glorious mountains! tall, clad with undying green; murmuring with streams; varying into ten thousand forms, as the shadows of the gorgeous clouds rest on them or pass away: yes, the mountains, the brothers of the thunder, the cradle of the winds; the clifted, valleyed, verdant, placid, fountained mountains, with an atmosphere of double death, are dreamt into salubrity, and the elated imagination feasts on the idea of the health which must be found amidst their shades.
The traversers of the Ghauts know other things of these glorious mountains—and yet with the impression deep in my memory of the wail of anguish and of death from my perishing companions, and of the fever that came upon myself like a whirlwind and all but thrust me into an early eternity, my heart can scarcely break through the delusion of their glorious beauty, and often pants in its dreamings, again to wander as I have done amidst their cliffs and their glens while the thunders bounded from rock to rock, and the lightnings spread around me a blazing sea, and the large, quick tears of heaven fell gushing over a guilty world.
The simple facts of this matter are as follows. Decaying vegetation and all stagnant moisture, under a certain temperature, with confined circulation, (say from 70° upwards) generate, wherever they are found together, an atmosphere of death: and the intensity of this malaria, is in
