provisions were never wanting in the
markets, even to such a degree that I often wondered at it, and
reproached myself with being so timorous and cautious in stirring
abroad, when the country people came freely and boldly to market, as if
there had been no manner of infection in the city, or danger of catching
it.

It was indeed one admirable piece of conduct in the said magistrates,
that the streets were kept constantly clear and free from all manner of
frightful objects, dead bodies, or any such things as were indecent or
unpleasant; unless where anybody fell down suddenly, or died in the
streets, as I have said above, and these were generally covered with
some cloth or blanket, or removed into the next churchyard till night.
All the needful works that carried terror with them, that were both
dismal and dangerous, were done in the night. If any diseased bodies
were removed, or dead bodies buried, or infected clothes burned, it was
done in the night; and all the bodies which were thrown into the great
pits in the several churchyards or burying grounds, as has been
observed, were so removed in the night, and everything was covered and
closed before day. So that in the daytime there was not the least signal
of the calamity to be seen or heard of, except what was to be observed
from the emptiness of the streets, and sometimes from the passionate
outcries and lamentations of the people, out at their windows, and from
the numbers of houses and shops shut up.

Nor was the silence and emptiness of the streets so much in the city as
in the outparts, except just at one particular time, when, as I have
mentioned, the plague came east, and spread over all the city. It was
indeed a merciful disposition of God, that as the plague began at one
end of the town first, as has been observed at large, so it proceeded
progressively to other parts, and did not come on this way, or eastward,
till it had spent its fury in the west part of the town; and so as it
came on one way it abated another. For example:--

It began at St. Giles's and the Westminster end of the town, and it was
in its height in all that part by about the middle of July, viz., in St.
Giles-in-the-Fields, St. Andrew's, Holborn, St. Clement's-Danes, St.
Martin's-in-the-Fields, and in Westminster. The latter end of July it
decreased in those parishes, and, coming east, it increased prodigiously
in Cripplegate, St. Sepulchre's, St. James's, Clerkenwell, and St.
Bride's and