; 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[251] 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 all the accounts which I have seen of the preceding
visitations which have been in London, nothing has been like it, the
number in the weekly bill amounting to almost forty thousands from the
22d of August to the 26th of September, being but five weeks. The
particulars of the bills are as follows: viz.,--

Aug. 22 to Aug. 29 7,496
Aug. 29 to Sept. 5 8,252
Sept. 5 to Sept. 12 7,690
Sept. 12 to Sept. 19 8,297
Sept. 19 to Sept. 26 6,460
------
38,195

This was a prodigious number of itself; but if I should add the reasons
which I have to believe that this account was deficient, and how
deficient it was, you would with me make no scruple to believe that
there died above ten thousand a week for all those weeks, one week with
another, and a proportion for several weeks, both before and after. The
confusion among the people, especially within the city, at that time was
inexpressible. The terror was so great at last, that the courage of the
people appointed to carry away the dead began to fail them; nay, several
of them died, although they had the distemper before, and were
recovered; and some of them dropped down when they have been carrying
the bodies even at the pitside, and just ready to throw them in. And
this confusion was greater in the city, because they had flattered
themselves with hopes of escaping, and thought the bitterness of death
was past. One cart, they told us, going up Shoreditch, was forsaken by
the drivers, or, being left to one man to drive, he died in the street;
and the horses, going on, overthrew the cart, and left the bodies, some
thrown here, some there, in a dismal manner. Another cart was, it seems,
found in the great pit in Finsbury