But How
Touching It Was To See Him Waddle Up And Down The Deck
After Mr. Wyse, Whom He Evidently Regarded In A Maternal
Point Of View - Begging For Milk With The Most Expressive
Snorts And Grunts, And Embarrassing My Good-Natured Master
By Demonstrative Appeals To His Fostering Offices!
I shall never forget Mr. Wyse's countenance that day in
Ullapool Bay, when he tried to command his feelings
sufficiently to acquaint me with the creature's death,
which he announced in this graphic sentence, "Ah, my
Lord!
- The poor thing! - TOES UP AT LAST!"
Bergen is not as neat and orderly in its architectural
arrangements as Drontheim; a great part of the city is
a confused network of narrow streets and alleys, much
resembling, I should think, its early inconveniences, in
the days of Olaf Kyrre. This close and stifling system
of street building must have ensured fatal odds against
the chances of life in some of those world-devastating
plagues that characterised past ages. Bergen was, in
fact, nearly depopulated by that terrible pestilence
which, in 1349, ravaged the North of Europe, and whose
memory is still preserved under the name of "The Black
Death."
I have been tempted to enclose you a sort of ballad,
which was composed while looking on the very scene of
this disastrous event; its only merit consists in its
local inspiration, and in its conveying a true relation
of the manner in which the plague entered the doomed
city.
THE BLACK DEATH OF BERGEN.
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