The daily mortality was frightful,--infants starved to death on the maternal breasts, which famine had parched and withered; mothers dropped dead in the streets, with their dead children in their arms.
"In many a house the watchmen, in their rounds, found a whole family of corpses, father, mother and children, side by side; for a disorder called the plague, naturally engendered of hardship and famine, now came, as if in kindness, to abridge the agony of the people.

The pestilence stalked at noonday through the city, and the doomed inhabitants fell like grass beneath it scythe.

From six thousand to eight thousand human beings sank before this scourge alone, yet the people resolutely held out--women and men mutually encouraging each other to resist the entrance of their foreign foe--an evil more horrible than pest or famine.

[3] "The missives from Valdez, who saw more vividly than the besieged could do, the uncertainty of his own position, now poured daily into the city, the enemy becoming more prodigal of his vows, as he felt that the ocean might yet save the victims from his grasp.

The inhabitants, in their ignorance, had gradually abandoned their hopes of relief, but they spurned the summons to surrender.