ey farther on the same side beyond the
bars, going in at the sign of Moses and Aaron.[245] There were several
houses together, which they said had not one person left alive in them;
and some that died last in several of those houses were left a little
too long before they were fetched out to be buried, the reason of which
was not, as some have written very untruly, that the living were not
sufficient to bury the dead, but that the mortality was so great in the
yard or alley that there was nobody left to give notice to the buriers
or sextons that there were any dead bodies there to be buried. It was
said, how true I know not, that some of those bodies were so corrupted
and so rotten, that it was with difficulty they were carried; and, as
the carts could not come any nearer than to the alley gate in the High
Street, it was so much the more difficult to bring them along. But I am
not certain how many bodies were then left: I am sure that ordinarily it
was not so.

As I have mentioned how the people were brought into a condition to
despair of life, and abandoned themselves, so this very thing had a
strange effect among us for three or four weeks; that is, it made them
bold and venturous. They were no more shy of one another, or restrained
within doors, but went anywhere and everywhere, and began to converse.
One would say to another, "I do not ask you how you are, or say how I
am. It is certain we shall all go: so 'tis no matter who is sick or who
is sound." And so they ran desperately into any place or company.

As it brought the people into public company, so it was surprising how
it brought them to crowd into the churches. They inquired no more into
who[246] they sat near to or far from, what offensive smells they met
with, or what condition the people seemed to be in; but, looking upon
themselves all as so many dead corpses, they came to the churches
without the least caution, and crowded together as if their lives were
of no consequence compared to the work which they came about there.
Indeed, the zeal which they showed in coming, and the earnestness and
affection they showed in their attention to what they heard, made it
manifest what a value people would all put upon the worship of God if
they thought every day they attended at the church that it would be
their last. Nor was it without other strange effects, for it took away
all manner of prejudice at, or scruple about, the person whom they found
in the pulpit when