to their noses,
accounting it an excellent thing to fortify the brain with such
odours, more by token that the air seemed all heavy and attainted with
the stench of the dead bodies and that of the sick and of the remedies
used.

[Footnote 7: _i.e._ aromatic drugs.]

Some were of a more barbarous, though, peradventure, a surer way of
thinking, avouching that there was no remedy against pestilences
better than--no, nor any so good as--to flee before them; wherefore,
moved by this reasoning and recking of nought but themselves, very
many, both men and women, abandoned their own city, their own houses
and homes, their kinsfolk and possessions, and sought the country
seats of others, or, at the least, their own, as if the wrath of God,
being moved to punish the iniquity of mankind, would not proceed to do
so wheresoever they might be, but would content itself with afflicting
those only who were found within the walls of their city, or as if
they were persuaded that no person was to remain therein and that its
last hour was come. And albeit these, who opined thus variously, died
not all, yet neither did they all escape; nay, many of each way of
thinking and in every place sickened of the plague and languished on
all sides, well nigh abandoned, having themselves, what while they
were whole, set the example to those who abode in health.

Indeed, leaving be that townsman avoided townsman and that well nigh
no neighbour took thought unto other and that kinsfolk seldom or never
visited one another and held no converse together save from afar, this
tribulation had stricken such terror to the hearts of all, men and
women alike, that brother forsook brother, uncle nephew and sister
brother and oftentimes wife husband; nay (what is yet more
extraordinary and well nigh incredible) fathers and mothers refused to
visit or tend their very children, as they had not been theirs. By
reason whereof there remained unto those (and the number of them, both
males and females, was incalculable) who fell sick, none other succour
than that which they owed either to the charity of friends (and of
these there were few) or the greed of servants, who tended them,
allured by high and extravagant wage; albeit, for all this, these
latter were not grown many, and those men and women of mean
understanding and for the most part unused to such offices, who served
for well nigh nought but to reach things called for by the sick or to
note when they died; an