impossible to say anything that is able to give a true idea
of it to those who did not see it, other than this: that it was indeed
very, very, very dreadful, and such as no tongue can express.

I got admittance into the churchyard by being acquainted with the sexton
who attended, who, though he did not refuse me at all, yet earnestly
persuaded me not to go, telling me very seriously (for he was a good,
religious, and sensible man) that it was indeed their business and duty
to venture, and to run all hazards, and that in it they might hope to be
preserved; but that I had no apparent call to it but my own curiosity,
which, he said, he believed I would not pretend was sufficient to
justify my running that hazard. I told him I had been pressed in my mind
to go, and that perhaps it might be an instructing sight that might not
be without its uses. "Nay," says the good man, "if you will venture upon
that score, 'name of God,[111] go in; for, depend upon it, it will be a
sermon to you, it may be, the best that ever you heard in your life. It
is a speaking sight," says he, "and has a voice with it, and a loud
one, to call us all to repentance;" and with that he opened the door,
and said, "Go, if you will."

His discourse had shocked my resolution a little, and I stood wavering
for a good while; but just at that interval I saw two links[112] come
over from the end of the Minories, and heard the bellman, and then
appeared a "dead cart," as they called it, coming over the streets: so I
could no longer resist my desire of seeing it, and went in. There was
nobody, as I could perceive at first, in the churchyard, or going into
it, but the buriers, and the fellow that drove the cart, or rather led
the horse and cart; but when they came up to the pit, they saw a man go
to and again,[113] muffled up in a brown cloak, and making motions with
his hands, under his cloak, as if he was[114] in great agony. And the
buriers immediately gathered about him, supposing he was one of those
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[115] 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 s