English consul, and I felt sure that, in Eastern phrase, his house
would cease to be his house, and would become the house of my sick
comrade. I should have judged rightly under ordinary
circumstances, but the levelling plague was abroad, and the dread
of it had dominion over the consular mind. So now (whether dying
or not, one could hardly tell), upon a quilt stretched out along
the floor, there lay the best hope of an ancient line, without the
material aids to comfort of even the humblest sort, and (sad to
say) without the consolation of a friend, or even a comrade worth
having. I have a notion that tenderness and pity are affections
occasioned in some measure by living within doors; certainly, at
the time I speak of, the open-air life which I have been leading,
or the wayfaring hardships of the journey, had so strangely blunted
me, that I felt intolerant of illness, and looked down upon my
companion as if the poor fellow in falling ill had betrayed a want
of spirit. I entertained too a most absurd idea--an idea that his
illness was partly affected. You see that I have made a
confession: this I hope--that I may always hereafter look
charitably upon the hard, savage acts of peasants, and the
cruelties of a "brutal" soldiery. God knows that I strived to melt
myself into common charity, and to put on a gentleness which I
could not feel, but this attempt did not cheat the keenness of the
sufferer; he could not have felt the less deserted because that I
was with him.

We called to aid a solemn Armenian (I think he was) half
soothsayer, half hakim, or doctor, who, all the while counting his
beads, fixed his eyes steadily upon the patient, and then suddenly
dealt him a violent blow on the chest. Methley bravely dissembled
his pain, for he fancied that the blow was meant to try whether or