days of August the disease increased above measure, and by the middle of the month almost all the inhabitants of the city were stretched upon the bed of pain by the contagion. Whole families were stricken and died in isolation, with no one to care for them or even to call a nurse, a physician, or a priest to give some aid. In the sad and deserted streets were only to be seen, passing like fugitive spectres, the secular clergy, the Jesuits, and the Franciscans in their long gowns, rapidly crossing from house to house to administer consolation to those dying who had the happiness to receive them; because, not infrequently, when the priests crossed the threshold of the house of death, they only encountered sepulchral stillness and corpses; at other times it happened that the priest, who bore the viaticum, was himself suddenly stricken with the disease and was obliged to lay himself down to die in the first doorway, while another priest came to take the holy elements from his hands, to continue the sacred task of abnegation and sacrifice. In the cathedral, in Santa Lucia, in San Cristobal, in Santiago, in San Sebastian, in Santa Catalina, the corpses were buried in the burying grounds near the churches; but so great was the crowd of the dead that the town government commanded new cemeteries to be opened and blessed in the fields; and, in order not to increase the panic, it ordered that the bodies should be carried to all these cemeteries at dawn, where a priest received them and repeated a prayer over them, and they were thrown into the common trench. That was a mournful spectacle, which those fields of death presented at that hour, with long files of corpses, badly clad or wrapped in serapes or in henequin mattings, laid out on boards, or stretchers.
The Governor, Don Esteban de Ascárraga did not escape the pest; he died August 8 and was buried quietly, not to augment the consternation of the city. A Franciscan friar, José de Orosco, mounted, hale and hearty, the pulpit in the church of San Francisco, to preach the sermon, and descended ill, and died. The regidors, in the town government, died; of eight Jesuits, who lived in the Colleges of San Javier and San Pedro, six