Alexandria Gazette

THE FIRST WEEK IN SEPTEMBER.

Long will that period of terror (says the Norfolk Argus) of death and desolation be remembered by those who had not fled from the pestilence. The fever had assumed its most fatal type, and had reached the centre and most populous part of the city. Bermuda street was like one great hospital; every house had its diseased or dead. On Briggs' Point the people were dying by the dozen per day, and in a space of considerable width, and extending across to the western limits of the city, people of every class were falling like withered leaves in Autumn time.

It was a time of intense excitement and consternation. It was too late to fly: and those who fled, as certainly fell as the bird fatally wounded by the fowler's shot. They arrived in Richmond, Petersburg and Hampton; but the venom had entered the lifeblood, and they lay down but to die. Here there were five hundred cases, and the number of deaths at one time, reached 80 in twenty-four hours, in our small remaining population!

The corpses accumulated so rapidly that coffins could not be supplied for them. The hearses hurried out to the grave yard with two, three and four at a load, and the coffined dead were piled up on the ground awaiting the opening of the graves and pits, by the insufficient force at work with the spade and the shovel. In that memorable week four hundred of the citizens of Norfolk were buried. There was no time for ceremony; the work of shrouding, coffining or boxing up and burying the putrefying corpses to the places of burial, and of covering up the dead, went on hastily and fearfully by day and night. The heart shudders at the thought of the scenes of death that were witnessed during the entire months of August and September.