been cleaned and reorganized, and was prepared to receive patients.

Girard opened his purse liberally, and spared no expense where money
would avail. But this was not all. Besides personally superintending the
interior of the hospital, he went about through the city seeking the
sick and conveying them to the hospital.

"In the great scarcity of help, he used frequently to receive the sick
and dying at the gate, assist in carrying them to their beds, nurse
them, receive their last messages, watch for their last breath, and
then, wrapping them in the sheet on which they had died, carry them out
to the burial ground and place them in the trench. He had a vivid
recollection of the difficulty of finding any kind of fabric in which to
wrap the dead, when the vast number of interments had exhausted the
supply of sheets. 'I would put them,' he would say, 'in any old rag I
could find.'"

[Illustration: GIRARD'S HEROISM.]

"If he ever left the hospital, it was to visit the infected districts,
and assist in removing the sick from the houses in which they were dying
without help. One scene of this kind, witnessed by a merchant who was
hurrying past with camphored handkerchief pressed to his mouth, affords
us a vivid glimpse of this heroic man engaged in his sublime vocation. A
carriage, rapidly driven by a black man, broke the silence of the
deserted and grass-grown street. It stopped before a frame house, and
the driver, first having bound a handkerchief over his mouth, opened the
door of the carriage, and quickly remounted to the box. A short,
thick-set man stepped from the coach and entered the house. In a minute
or two the observer, who stood at a safe distance watching the