nk and victuals, and sometimes farthings; and he in return would
pipe and sing, and talk simply, which diverted the people; and thus he
lived. It was but a very bad time for this diversion while things were
as I have told; yet the poor fellow went about as usual, but was almost
starved: and when anybody asked how he did, he would answer, the dead
cart had not taken him yet, but that they had promised to call for him
next week.

It happened one night that this poor fellow, whether somebody had given
him too much drink or no (John Hayward said he had not drink in his
house, but that they had given him a little more victuals than ordinary
at a public house in Coleman Street), and the poor fellow having not
usually had a bellyful, or perhaps not a good while, was laid all along
upon the top of a bulk or stall, and fast asleep at a door in the street
near London Wall, towards Cripplegate; and that, upon the same bulk or
stall, the people of some house in the alley of which the house was a
corner, hearing a bell (which they always rung before the cart came),
had laid a body really dead of the plague just by him, thinking too that
this poor fellow had been a dead body as the other was, and laid there
by some of the neighbors.

Accordingly, when John Hayward with his bell and the cart came along,
finding two dead bodies lie upon the stall, they took them up with the
instrument they used, and threw them into the cart; and all this while
the piper slept soundly.

From hence they passed along, and took in other dead bodies, till, as
honest John Hayward told me, they almost buried him alive in the cart;
yet all this while he slept soundly. At length the cart came to the
place where the bodies were to be thrown into the ground, which, as I do
remember, was at Mountmill; and, as the cart usually stopped some time
before they were ready to shoot out the melancholy load they had in it,
as soon as the cart stopped, the fellow awaked, and struggled a little
to get his head out from among the dead bodies; when, raising himself up
in the cart, he called out, "Hey, where am I?" This frighted the fellow
that attended about the work; but, after some pause, John Hayward,
recovering himself, said, "Lord bless us! There's somebody in the cart
not quite dead!" So another called to him, and said, "Who are you?" The
fellow answered, "I am the poor piper. Where am I?"--"Where are you?"
says Hayward. "Why, you are in the dead cart, and we are going