Fields, the driver being dead, or
having been gone and abandoned it; and the horses running too near it,
the cart fell in, and drew the horses in also. It was suggested that the
driver was thrown in with it, and that the cart fell upon him, by reason
his whip was seen to be in the pit among the bodies; but that, I
suppose, could not be certain.

In our parish of Aldgate the dead carts were several times, as I have
heard, found standing at the churchyard gate full of dead bodies, but
neither bellman, or driver, or any one else, with it. Neither in these
or many other cases did they know what bodies they had in their cart,
for sometimes they were let down with ropes out of balconies and out of
windows, and sometimes the bearers brought them to the cart, sometimes
other people; nor, as the men themselves said, did they trouble
themselves to keep any account of the numbers.

The vigilance of the magistrate was now put to the utmost trial, and, it
must be confessed, can never be enough acknowledged on this occasion;
also, whatever expense or trouble they were at, two things were never
neglected in the city or suburbs either:--

1. Provisions were always to be had in full plenty, and the price not
much raised neither, hardly worth speaking.

2. No dead bodies lay unburied or uncovered; and if any one walked from
one end of the city to another, no funeral, or sign of it, was to be
seen in the daytime, except a little, as I have said, in the first three
weeks in September.

This last article, perhaps, will hardly be believed when some accounts
which others have published since that shall be seen, wherein they say
that the dead lay unburied, which I am sure was utterly false; at least,
if it had been anywhere so, it must have been in houses where the living
were gone from the dead, having found means, as I have observed, to
escape, and where no notice was given to the officers. All which amounts
to nothing at all in the case in hand; for this I am positive in, having
myself been employed a little in the direction of that part of the
parish in which I lived, and where as great a desolation was made, in
proportion to the number of the inhabitants, as was anywhere. I say, I
am sure that there were no dead bodies remained unburied; that is to
say, none that the proper officers knew of, none for want of people to
carry them off, and buriers to put them into the ground and cover them.
And this is sufficient to the argument; for w