said above; and these were generally covered with
some cloth or blanket, or removed into the next churchyard till night.
All the needful works that carried terror with them, that were both
dismal and dangerous, were done in the night; if any diseased bodies
were removed, or dead bodies buried, or infected clothes burnt, it was
done in the night; and all the bodies which were thrown into the
great pits in the several churchyards or burying-grounds, as has been
observed, were so removed in the night, and everything was covered and
closed before day. So that in the daytime there was not the least signal
of the calamity to be seen or heard of, except what was to be observed
from the emptiness of the streets, and sometimes from the passionate
outcries and lamentations of the people, out at their windows, and from
the numbers of houses and shops shut up.

Nor was the silence and emptiness of the streets so much in the city
as in the out-parts, except just at one particular time when, as I have
mentioned, the plague came east and spread over all the city. It was
indeed a merciful disposition of God, that as the plague began at one
end of the town first (as has been observed at large) so it proceeded
progressively to other parts, and did not come on this way, or eastward,
till it had spent its fury in the West part of the town; and so, as it
came on one way, it abated another. For example, it began at St Giles's
and the Westminster end of the town, and it was in its height in all
that part by about the middle of July, viz., in St Giles-in-the-Fields,
St Andrew's, Holborn, St Clement Danes, St Martin-in-the-Fields, and in
Westminster. The latter end of July it decreased in those parishes; and
coming east, it increased prodigiously in Cripplegate, St Sepulcher's,
St James's, Clarkenwell, and St Bride's and Aldersgate. While it was in
all these parishes, the city and all the parishes of the Southwark
side of the water and all Stepney, Whitechappel, Aldgate, Wapping, and
Ratcliff, were very little touched; so that people went about their
business unconcerned, carried on their trades, kept open their shops,
and conversed freely with one another in all the city, the east and
north-east suburbs, and in Southwark, almost as if the plague had not
been among us.

Even when the north and north-west suburbs were fully infected, viz.,
Cripplegate, Clarkenwell, Bishopsgate, and Shoreditch, yet still all the
rest were tolerably well. For exa