the plague was begun, otherwise than as I have said in
St. Giles's,--I think it was in March,--seeing a crowd of people in the
street I joined with them to satisfy my curiosity, and found them all
staring up into the air to see what a woman told them appeared plain to
her, which was an angel clothed in white, with a fiery sword in his
hand, waving it or brandishing it over his head. She described every
part of the figure to the life, showed them the motion and the form,
and the poor people came into it so eagerly and with so much readiness:
"Yes! I see it all plainly," says one, "there's the sword as plain as
can be;" another saw the angel; one saw his very face, and cried out
what a glorious creature he was! One saw one thing, and one another. I
looked as earnestly as the rest, but perhaps not with so much
willingness to be imposed upon; and I said indeed that I could see
nothing but a white cloud, bright on one side by the shining of the sun
upon the other part. The woman endeavored to show it me, but could not
make me confess that I saw it, which indeed if I had, I must have lied;
but the woman turning to me looked me in the face and fancied I laughed,
in which her imagination deceived her too, for I really did not laugh,
but was seriously reflecting how the poor people were terrified by the
force of their own imagination. However, she turned to me, called me a
profane fellow and a scoffer, told me that it was a time of God's anger,
and dreadful judgments were approaching, and that despisers such as I
should wander and perish.

The people about her seemed disgusted as well as she, and I found there
was no persuading them that I did not laugh at them, and that I should
be rather mobbed by them than be able to undeceive them. So I left them,
and this appearance passed for as real as the blazing star itself.

Another encounter I had in the open day also; and this was in going
through a narrow passage from Petty France into Bishopsgate Churchyard,
by a row of almshouses. There are two churchyards to Bishopsgate Church
or parish; one we go over to pass from the place called Petty France
into Bishopsgate Street, coming out just by the church door; the other
is on the side of the narrow passage where the almshouses are on the
left, and a dwarf wall with a palisade on it on the right hand, and the
city wall on the other side more to the right.

In this narrow passage stands a man looking through the palisades into
the bury