eve
their wants at the expense of the country. By that means the country was
made very uneasy at them, and sometimes took them up, though even then
they scarce knew what to do with them, and were always very backward to
punish them; but often, too, they forced them from place to place, till
they were obliged to come back again to London.

I have, since my knowing this story of John and his brother, inquired,
and found that there were a great many of the poor disconsolate people,
as above, fled into the country every way; and some of them got little
sheds and barns and outhouses to live in, where they could obtain so
much kindness of the country, and especially where they had any, the
least satisfactory account to give of themselves, and particularly that
they did not come out of London too late. But others, and that in great
numbers, built themselves little huts and retreats in the fields and
woods, and lived like hermits in holes and caves, or any place they
could find, and where, we may be sure, they suffered great extremities,
such that many of them were obliged to come back again, whatever the
danger was. And so those little huts were often found empty, and the
country people supposed the inhabitants lay dead in them of the plague,
and would not go near them for fear, no, not in a great while; nor is it
unlikely but that some of the unhappy wanderers might die so all alone,
even sometimes for want of help, as particularly in one tent or hut was
found a man dead, and on the gate of a field just by was cut with his
knife, in uneven letters, the following words, by which it may be
supposed the other man escaped, or that, one dying first, the other
buried him as well as he could:--

O m I s E r Y!
We Bo T H Sh a L L D y E,
W o E, W o E

I have given an account already of what I found to have been the case
down the river among the seafaring men, how the ships lay in the
"offing," as it is called, in rows or lines, astern of one another,
quite down from the Pool as far as I could see. I have been told that
they lay in the same manner quite down the river as low as
Gravesend,[222] and some far beyond, even everywhere, or in every place
where they could ride with safety as to wind and weather. Nor did I ever
hear that the plague reached to any of the people on board those ships,
except such as lay up in the Pool, or as high as Deptford Reach,
although the people went frequently on shore to the