h the plague. I was born in England,
and have a right to live in it if I can.

_Tho._ But you know every vagrant person may, by the laws of
England, be taken up, and passed back to their last legal
settlement.

_John._ But how shall they make me vagrant? I desire only to
travel on upon my lawful occasions.

_Tho._ What lawful occasions can we pretend to travel, or rather
wander, upon? They will not be put off with words.

_John._ Is not flying to save our lives a lawful occasion? And do
they not all know that the fact is true? We cannot be said to
dissemble.

_Tho._ But, suppose they let us pass, whither shall we go?

_John._ Anywhere to save our lives: it is time enough to consider
that when we are got out of this town. If I am once out of this
dreadful place, I care not where I go.

_Tho._ We shall be driven to great extremities. I know not what to
think of it.

_John._ Well, Tom, consider of it a little.

This was about the beginning of July; and though the plague was come
forward in the west and north parts of the town, yet all Wapping, as I
have observed before, and Redriff and Ratcliff, and Limehouse and
Poplar, in short, Deptford and Greenwich, both sides of the river from
the Hermitage, and from over against it, quite down to Blackwall, was
entirely free. There had not one person died of the plague in all
Stepney Parish, and not one on the south side of Whitechapel Road, no,
not in any parish; and yet the weekly bill was that very week risen up
to 1,006.

It was a fortnight after this before the two brothers met again, and
then the case was a little altered, and the plague was exceedingly
advanced, and the number greatly increased. The bill was up at 2,785,
and prodigiously increasing; though still both sides of the river, as
below, kept pretty well. But some began to die in Redriff, and about
five or six in Ratcliff Highway, when the sailmaker came to his brother
John, express,[190] and in some fright; for he was absolutely warned out
of his lodging, and had only a week to provide himself. His brother John
was in as bad a case, for he was quite out, and had only[191] begged
leave of his master, the biscuit baker, to lodge in an outhouse
belonging to his workhouse, where he only lay upon straw, with some
biscuit sacks, or "bread sacks," as they called them, laid upon it, and
some of the same sacks to cover him.