may serve to
give an idea of the distracted humor of the poor people at that time,
and this was their following a worse sort of deceivers than any of
these; for these petty thieves only deluded them to pick their pockets
and get their money (in which their wickedness, whatever it was, lay
chiefly on the side of the deceiver's deceiving, not upon the deceived);
but, in this part I am going to mention, it lay chiefly in the people
deceived, or equally in both. And this was in wearing charms,
philters,[67] exorcisms,[68] amulets,[69] and I know not what
preparations to fortify the body against the plague, as if the plague
was not the hand of God, but a kind of a possession of an evil spirit,
and it was to be kept off with crossings,[70] signs of the zodiac,[71]
papers tied up with so many knots, and certain words or figures written
on them, as particularly the word "Abracadabra,"[72] formed in triangle
or pyramid; thus,--

A B R A C A D A B R A
A B R A C A D A B R
A B R A C A D A B
A B R A C A D A
A B R A C A D
A B R A C A
A B R A C
A B R A
A B R
A B
A

Others had the Jesuits' mark in a cross:--

I H
S[73]

Others had nothing but this mark; thus,--

+

I might spend a great deal of my time in exclamations against the
follies, and indeed the wickednesses of those things, in a time of such
danger, in a matter of such consequence as this of a national infection;
but my memorandums of these things relate rather to take notice of the
fact, and mention only that it was so. How the poor people found the
insufficiency of those things, and how many of them were afterwards
carried away in the dead carts, and thrown into the common graves of
every parish with these hellish charms and trumpery hanging about their
necks, remains to be spoken of as we go along.

All this was the effect of the hurry the people were in, after the first
notion of the plague being at hand was among them, and which may be said
to be from about Michaelmas,[74] 1664, but more particularly after the
two men died in St. Giles's, in the beginning of December; and again
after another alarm in February, for when the plague evidently spread
itself, they soon began to see the folly of trusting to these
unperforming creatures who had gulled them of their money; and then
their fears worked another way, namely, to amazement and stupidity, not