, and were for calling it a particular mark of God's vengeance
upon them for leading the poor people into the pit of destruction merely
for the lucre of a little money they got by them; but I cannot go that
length, neither. That abundance of them died is certain (many of them
came within the reach of my own knowledge); but that all of them were
swept off, I much question. I believe, rather, they fled into the
country, and tried their practices upon the people there, who were in
apprehension of the infection before it came among them.

This, however, is certain, not a man of them appeared for a great while
in or about London. There were indeed several doctors who published
bills recommending their several physical preparations for cleansing the
body, as they call it, after the plague, and needful, as they said, for
such people to take who had been visited and had been cured; whereas, I
must own, I believe that it was the opinion of the most eminent
physicians of that time, that the plague was itself a sufficient purge,
and that those who escaped the infection needed no physic to cleanse
their bodies of any other things (the running sores, the tumors, etc.,
which were broken and kept open by the direction of the physicians,
having sufficiently cleansed them); and that all other distempers, and
causes of distempers, were effectually carried off that way. And as the
physicians gave this as their opinion wherever they came, the quacks got
little business.

There were indeed several little hurries which happened after the
decrease of the plague, and which, whether they were contrived to fright
and disorder the people, as some imagined, I cannot say; but sometimes
we were told the plague would return by such a time; and the famous
Solomon Eagle, the naked Quaker I have mentioned, prophesied evil
tidings every day, and several others, telling us that London had not
been sufficiently scourged, and the sorer and severer strokes were yet
behind. Had they stopped there, or had they descended to particulars,
and told us that the city should be the next year destroyed by fire,
then, indeed, when we had seen it come to pass, we should not have been
to blame to have paid more than common respect to their prophetic
spirits (at least, we should have wondered at them, and have been more
serious in our inquiries after the meaning of it, and whence they had
the foreknowledge); but as they generally told us of a relapse into the
plague, we