y may be capable to continue infected, without
the disease discovering itself, many days, nay, weeks together; even not
a quarantine[276] of days only, but a soixantine,[277]--not only forty
days, but sixty days, or longer.

It is true there was, as I observed at first, and is well known to many
yet living, a very cold winter and a long frost, which continued three
months; and this, the doctors say, might check the infection. But then
the learned must allow me to say, that if, according to their notion,
the disease was, as I may say, only frozen up, it would, like a frozen
river, have returned to its usual force and current when it thawed;
whereas the principal recess of this infection, which was from February
to April, was after the frost was broken and the weather mild and warm.

But there is another way of solving all this difficulty, which I think
my own remembrance of the thing will supply; and that is, the fact is
not granted, namely, that there died none in those long intervals, viz.,
from the 20th of December to the 9th of February, and from thence to the
22d of April. The weekly bills are the only evidence on the other side,
and those bills were not of credit enough, at least with me, to support
an hypothesis, or determine a question of such importance as this; for
it was our received opinion at that time, and I believe upon very good
grounds, that the fraud lay in the parish officers, searchers, and
persons appointed to give account of the dead, and what diseases they
died of; and as people were very loath at first to have the neighbors
believe their houses were infected, so they gave money to procure, or
otherwise procured, the dead persons to be returned as dying of other
distempers; and this I know was practiced afterwards in many places, I
believe I might say in all places where the distemper came, as will be
seen by the vast increase of the numbers placed in the weekly bills
under other articles[278] of diseases during the time of the infection.
For example, in the months of July and August, when the plague was
coming on to its highest pitch, it was very ordinary to have from a
thousand to twelve hundred, nay, to almost fifteen hundred, a week, of
other distempers. Not that the numbers of those distempers were really
increased to such a degree; but the great number of families and houses
where really the infection was, obtained the favor to have their dead be
returned of other distempers, to prevent the s