on as it did then, a few weeks more would
have cleared the town of all and everything that had a soul. Men
everywhere began to despair; every heart failed them for fear; people
were made desperate through the anguish of their souls; and the terrors
of death sat in the very faces and countenances of the people.

In that very moment, when we might very well say, "Vain was the help of
man,"[350]--I say, in that very moment it pleased God, with a most
agreeable surprise, to cause the fury of it to abate, even of itself;
and the malignity declining, as I have said, though infinite numbers
were sick, yet fewer died; and the very first week's bill decreased
1,843, a vast number indeed.

It is impossible to express the change that appeared in the very
countenances of the people that Thursday morning when the weekly bill
came out. It might have been perceived in their countenances that a
secret surprise and smile of joy sat on everybody's face. They shook one
another by the hands in the streets, who would hardly go on the same
side of the way with one another before. Where the streets were not too
broad, they would open their windows and call from one house to another,
and asked how they did, and if they had heard the good news that the
plague was abated. Some would return, when they said good news, and ask,
"What good news?" And when they answered that the plague was abated, and
the bills decreased almost two thousand, they would cry out, "God be
praised!" and would weep aloud for joy, telling them they had heard
nothing of it; and such was the joy of the people, that it was, as it
were, life to them from the grave. I could almost set down as many
extravagant things done in the excess of their joy as of their grief;
but that would be to lessen the value of it.

I must confess myself to have been very much dejected just before this
happened; for the prodigious numbers that were taken sick the week or
two before, besides those that died, was[351] such, and the lamentations
were so great everywhere, that a man must have seemed to have acted even
against his reason if he had so much as expected to escape; and as there
was hardly a house but mine in all my neighborhood but what was
infected, so, had it gone on, it would not have been long that there
would have been any more neighbors to be infected. Indeed, it is hardly
credible what dreadful havoc the last three weeks had made: for, if I
might believe the person whose calculatio