It was a natural impulse to visit this inviting region.  I procured a skiff and rowing across the river landed at the principal wharf of the city.  No one met me there.  I looked, and saw no one:  I heard no movement:  though the stillness everywhere was such that I heard the flies buzz, and the ripples break against the shallows of the beach.  I walked through the solitary streets.  The town lay as in a dream, under some deadening spell of loneliness from which I almost feared to wake it.  Plainly it had not slept long.  There was no grass growing in the paved ways and rain had not washed away the prints of footsteps in the dust.  Yet I went about unchecked.  I went into empty ropewalks, workshops, and smithies.  The spinner’s wheel was idle; the carpenter had gone from his workbench and left his sash and casing unfinished.  Fresh bark was in the tanner’s vat, and the fresh chopped lightwood stood piled against the baker’s oven.  The blacksmith’s shop was cold; but his coal-heap and ladling-pool and crooked water-horn were all there, as if he had just gone off for a holiday.  No workpeople, anywhere, looked to know my errand.  If I went into the gardens, clinking the wicket latch loudly after me, to pull the marigolds, heartsease, and lady’s-slippers, and draw a drink with the water-sodden well-bucket and its noisy chain; or, knocking off with my stick the tall, heavy-headed dahlias and sunflowers, hunting among the beds for cucumbers and love-apples—­no one called out to me from any opened window; no dog sprang forward to bark an alarm.  I could have supposed the people hidden in the houses, but the doors were unfastened; and when at last I timidly entered, I found dead ashes cold upon the hearth, and had to tread on tiptoe, as if walking down the aisle of a country church, to avoid rousing irreverent echoes from the naked floors.

On the outskirts of the town was the city graveyard.  But there was no record of plague there, nor did it in any wise differ much from other Protestant American cemeteries.  Some of the mounds were not long sodded; some of the stones were newly set, their dates recent, and their black inscriptions glossy in the hardly dried lettering-ink.  Beyond the graveyard, out in the fields, I saw, in one spot hard by where the fruited boughs of a young orchard had been torn down, the still smoldering embers of a barbecue fire that had been constructed of rails from the fencing around it.  It was the latest sign of life there.  Fields upon fields of heavy-headed grain lay rotting ungathered upon the ground.  No one was at hand to take in their rich harvest.  As far as the eye could reach, they stretched away—­they, sleeping too in the hazy air of autumn.

Only two portions of the city seemed to suggest the import of this mysterious solitude.  In the southern suburb the houses looking out upon the country showed, by their splintered woodwork and walls battered to the foundation, that they had lately been the mark of a destructive cannonade.  And in and around the splendid temple, which had been the chief object of my admiration, armed men were barracked, surrounded by their stacks of musketry and pieces of heavy ordnance.  These challenged me to render an account of myself, and to tell the reason why I had had the temerity to cross the water without a written permit from a leader of their band.