第67章 Part 5(13)

I must acknowledge that this time was terrible,that I was sometimes at the end of all my resolutions,and that I had not the courage that Ihad at the beginning.As the extremity brought other people abroad,it drove me home,and except having made my voyage down to Blackwall and Greenwich,as I have related,which was an excursion,I kept afterwards very much within doors,as I had for about a fortnight before.I have said already that I repented several times that I had ventured to stay in town,and had not gone away with my brother and his family,but it was too late for that now;and after I had retreated and stayed within doors a good while before my impatience led me abroad,then they called me,as I have said,to an ugly and dangerous office which brought me out again;but as that was expired while the height of the distemper lasted,I retired again,and continued dose ten or twelve days more,during which many dismal spectacles represented themselves in my view out of my own windows and in our own street -as that particularly from Harrow Alley,of the poor outrageous creature which danced and sung in his agony;and many others there were.Scarce a day or night passed over but some dismal thing or other happened at the end of that Harrow Alley,which was a place full of poor people,most of them belonging to the butchers or to employments depending upon the butchery.

Sometimes heaps and throngs of people would burst out of the alley,most of them women,making a dreadful clamour,mixed or compounded of screeches,cryings,and calling one another,that we could not conceive what to make of it.Almost all the dead part of the night the dead-cart stood at the end of that alley,for if it went in it could not well turn again,and could go in but a little way.There,Isay,it stood to receive dead bodies,and as the churchyard was but a little way off,if it went away full it would soon be back again.It is impossible to describe the most horrible cries and noise the poor people would make at their bringing the dead bodies of their children and friends out of the cart,and by the number one would have thought there had been none left behind,or that there were people enough for a small city living in those places.Several times they cried 'Murder',sometimes 'Fire';but it was easy to perceive it was all distraction,and the complaints of distressed and distempered people.

I believe it was everywhere thus as that time,for the plague raged for six or seven weeks beyond all that I have expressed,and came even to such a height that,in the extremity,they began to break into that excellent order of which I have spoken so much in behalf of the magistrates;namely,that no dead bodies were seen in the street or burials in the daytime:for there was a necessity in this extremity to bear with its being otherwise for a little while.

One thing I cannot omit here,and indeed I thought it was extraordinary,at least it seemed a remarkable hand of Divine justice:viz.,that all the predictors,astrologers,fortune-tellers,and what they called cunning-men,conjurers,and the like:calculators of nativities and dreamers of dream,and such people,were gone and vanished;not one of them was to be found.I am verily persuaded that a great number of them fell in the heat of the calamity,having ventured to stay upon the prospect of getting great estates;and indeed their gain was but too great for a time,through the madness and folly of the people.But now they were silent;many of them went to their long home,not able to foretell their own fate or to calculate their own nativities.Some have been critical enough to say that every one of them died.I dare not affirm that;but this I must own,that I never heard of one of them that ever appeared after the calamity was over.

But to return to my particular observations during this dreadful part of the visitation.I am now come,as I have said,to the month of September,which was the most dreadful of its kind,I believe,that ever London saw;for,by all the accounts which I have seen of the preceding visitations which have been in London,nothing has been like it,the number in the weekly bill amounting to almost 40,000from the 22nd of August to the 26th of September,being but five weeks.

The particulars of the bills are as follows,viz.:-From August the 22nd to the 29th 7496""29th "5th September 8252"September the 5th "12th 7690""12th "19th 8297""19th "26th 6460-----

38,195

This was a prodigious number of itself,but if I should add the reasons which I have to believe that this account was deficient,and how deficient it was,you would,with me,make no scruple to believe that there died above ten thousand a week for all those weeks,one week with another,and a proportion for several weeks both before and after.The confusion among the people,especially within the city,at that time,was inexpressible.The terror was so great at last that the courage of the people appointed to carry away the dead began to fail them;nay,several of them died,although they had the distemper before and were recovered,and some of them dropped down when they have been carrying the bodies even at the pit side,and just ready to throw them in;and this confusion was greater in the city because they had flattered themselves with hopes of escaping,and thought the bitterness of death was past.One cart,they told us,going up Shoreditch was forsaken of the drivers,or being left to one man to drive,he died in the street;and the horses going on overthrew the cart,and left the bodies,some thrown out here,some there,in a dismal manner.Another cart was,it seems,found in the great pit in Finsbury Fields,the driver being dead,or having been gone and abandoned it,and the horses running too near it,the cart fell in and drew the horses in also.It was suggested that the driver was thrown in with it and that the cart fell upon him,by reason his whip was seen to be in the pit among the bodies;but that,I suppose,could not be certain.