dful time,
and go on to describe the objects that appeared among us every day, the
dreadful extravagancies which the distraction of sick people drove them
into; how the streets began now to be fuller of frightful objects, and
families to be made even a terror to themselves. But after I have told
you, as I have above, that one man, being tied in his bed, and finding
no other way to deliver himself, set the bed on fire with his candle,
which unhappily stood within his reach, and burnt himself in his bed;
and how another, by the insufferable torment he bore, danced and sung
naked in the streets, not knowing one ecstasy from another; I say, after
I have mentioned these things, what can be added more? What can be said
to represent the misery of these times more lively to the reader, or to
give him a more perfect idea of a complicated distress?

I must acknowledge that this time was terrible, that I was sometimes at
the end of all my resolutions, and that I had not the courage that I had
at the beginning. As the extremity brought other people abroad, it
drove me home, and except having made my voyage down to Blackwall and
Greenwich, as I have related, which was an excursion, I kept afterwards
very much within doors, as I had for about a fortnight before. I have
said already that I repented several times that I had ventured to stay
in town, and had not gone away with my brother and his family, but it
was too late for that now; and after I had retreated and stayed within
doors a good while before my impatience led me abroad, then they called
me, as I have said, to an ugly and dangerous office which brought me out
again; but as that was expired while the height of the distemper lasted,
I retired again, and continued dose ten or twelve days more, during
which many dismal spectacles represented themselves in my view out of
my own windows and in our own street--as that particularly from Harrow
Alley, of the poor outrageous creature which danced and sung in his
agony; and many others there were. Scarce a day or night passed over
but some dismal thing or other happened at the end of that Harrow Alley,
which was a place full of poor people, most of them belonging to the
butchers or to employments depending upon the butchery.

Sometimes heaps and throngs of people would burst out of the alley,
most of them women, making a dreadful clamour, mixed or compounded of
screeches, cryings, and calling one another, that we could not conceive
w