ose poor delirious or desperate
creatures that used to pretend, as I have said, to bury themselves. He
said nothing as he walked about, but two or three times groaned very
deeply and loud, and sighed as he would break his heart.

When the buriers came up to him they soon found he was neither a
person infected and desperate, as I have observed above, or a person
distempered--in mind, but one oppressed with a dreadful weight of grief
indeed, having his wife and several of his children all in the cart that
was just come in with him, and he followed in an agony and excess of
sorrow. He mourned heartily, as it was easy to see, but with a kind of
masculine grief that could not give itself vent by tears; and calmly
defying the buriers to let him alone, said he would only see the bodies
thrown in and go away, so they left importuning him. But no sooner was
the cart turned round and the bodies shot into the pit promiscuously,
which was a surprise to him, for he at least expected they would have
been decently laid in, though indeed he was afterwards convinced that
was impracticable; I say, no sooner did he see the sight but he cried
out aloud, unable to contain himself. I could not hear what he said,
but he went backward two or three steps and fell down in a swoon. The
buriers ran to him and took him up, and in a little while he came to
himself, and they led him away to the Pie Tavern over against the end
of Houndsditch, where, it seems, the man was known, and where they
took care of him. He looked into the pit again as he went away, but the
buriers had covered the bodies so immediately with throwing in earth,
that though there was light enough, for there were lanterns, and candles
in them, placed all night round the sides of the pit, upon heaps of
earth, seven or eight, or perhaps more, yet nothing could be seen.

This was a mournful scene indeed, and affected me almost as much as the
rest; but the other was awful and full of terror. The cart had in it
sixteen or seventeen bodies; some were wrapt up in linen sheets, some in
rags, some little other than naked, or so loose that what covering they
had fell from them in the shooting out of the cart, and they fell
quite naked among the rest; but the matter was not much to them, or the
indecency much to any one else, seeing they were all dead, and were to
be huddled together into the common grave of mankind, as we may call it,
for here was no difference made, but poor and rich went to