s terrifying particulars, and that it threatened an
universal infection; so many people having already conversed with the
sick or distempered, and having, as might be supposed, received
infection from them, that it would be impossible to put a stop to it.

Here the opinion of the physicians agreed with my observation
afterwards, namely, that the danger was spreading insensibly: for the
sick could infect none but those that came within reach of the sick
person; but that one man, who may have really received the infection,
and knows it not, but goes abroad and about as a sound person, may give
the plague to a thousand people, and they to greater numbers in
proportion, and neither the person giving the infection, nor the persons
receiving it, know anything of it, and perhaps not feel the effects of
it for several days after. For example:--

Many persons, in the time of this visitation, never perceived that they
were infected till they found, to their unspeakable surprise, the tokens
come out upon them, after which they seldom lived six hours; for those
spots they called the tokens were really gangrene spots, or mortified
flesh, in small knobs as broad as a little silver penny, and hard as a
piece of callus[264] or horn; so that when the disease was come up to
that length, there was nothing could follow but certain death. And yet,
as I said, they knew nothing of their being infected, nor found
themselves so much as out of order, till those mortal marks were upon
them. But everybody must allow that they were infected in a high degree
before, and must have been so some time; and consequently their breath,
their sweat, their very clothes, were contagious for many days before.

This occasioned a vast variety of cases, which physicians would have
much more opportunity to remember than I; but some came within the
compass of my observation or hearing, of which I shall name a few.

A certain citizen who had lived safe and untouched till the month of
September, when the weight of the distemper lay more in the city than it
had done before, was mighty cheerful, and something too bold, as I think
it was, in his talk of how secure he was, how cautious he had been, and
how he had never come near any sick body. Says another citizen, a
neighbor of his, to him one day, "Do not be too confident, Mr. ----: it
is hard to say who is sick and who is well; for we see men alive and
well to outward appearance one hour, and dead the next."--"That