hat to make of it. Almost all the dead part of the night the dead-cart
stood at the end of that alley, for if it went in it could not well
turn again, and could go in but a little way. There, I say, it stood to
receive dead bodies, and as the churchyard was but a little way off,
if it went away full it would soon be back again. It is impossible to
describe the most horrible cries and noise the poor people would make at
their bringing the dead bodies of their children and friends out of the
cart, and by the number one would have thought there had been none left
behind, or that there were people enough for a small city living in
those places. Several times they cried 'Murder', sometimes 'Fire'; but
it was easy to perceive it was all distraction, and the complaints of
distressed and distempered people.

I believe it was everywhere thus as that time, for the plague raged for
six or seven weeks beyond all that I have expressed, and came even to
such a height that, in the extremity, they began to break into that
excellent order of which I have spoken so much in behalf of the
magistrates; namely, that no dead bodies were seen in the street or
burials in the daytime: for there was a necessity in this extremity to
bear with its being otherwise for a little while.

One thing I cannot omit here, and indeed I thought it was extraordinary,
at least it seemed a remarkable hand of Divine justice: viz., that
all the predictors, astrologers, fortune-tellers, and what they called
cunning-men, conjurers, and the like: calculators of nativities and
dreamers of dream, and such people, were gone and vanished; not one of
them was to be found. I am verily persuaded that a great number of
them fell in the heat of the calamity, having ventured to stay upon the
prospect of getting great estates; and indeed their gain was but too
great for a time, through the madness and folly of the people. But now
they were silent; many of them went to their long home, not able to
foretell their own fate or to calculate their own nativities. Some have
been critical enough to say that every one of them died. I dare not
affirm that; but this I must own, that I never heard of one of them that
ever appeared after the calamity was over.

But to return to my particular observations during this dreadful part
of the visitation. I am now come, as I have said, to the month of
September, which was the most dreadful of its kind, I believe, that ever
London saw; for, by al