attended by
men with veiled faces and holding cloths to their mouths, who rang
doleful bells and cried in a loud and solemn voice, 'Bring out your
dead!' The corpses put into these carts were buried by torchlight in
great pits; no service being performed over them; all men being afraid to
stay for a moment on the brink of the ghastly graves. In the general
fear, children ran away from their parents, and parents from their
children. Some who were taken ill, died alone, and without any help.
Some were stabbed or strangled by hired nurses who robbed them of all
their money, and stole the very beds on which they lay. Some went mad,
dropped from the windows, ran through the streets, and in their pain and
frenzy flung themselves into the river.

These were not all the horrors of the time. The wicked and dissolute, in
wild desperation, sat in the taverns singing roaring songs, and were
stricken as they drank, and went out and died. The fearful and
superstitious persuaded themselves that they saw supernatural
sights--burning swords in the sky, gigantic arms and darts. Others
pretended that at nights vast crowds of ghosts walked round and round the
dismal pits. One madman, naked, and carrying a brazier full of burning
coals upon his head, stalked through the streets, crying out that he was
a Prophet, commissioned to denounce the vengeance of the Lord on wicked
London. Another always went to and fro, exclaiming, 'Yet forty days, and
London shall be destroyed!' A third awoke the echoes in the dismal
streets, by night and by day, and made the blood of the sick run cold, by
calling out incessantly, in a deep hoarse voice, 'O, the great and
dreadful God!'

Through the months of July and August and September, the Great Plague
raged more and more. Great fires were lighted in the streets, in the
hope of stopping the infection; but there was a plague of rain too, and
it beat the fires out. At last, the winds which usually arise at that
time of the year which is called the equinox, when day and night are of
equal length all over the world, began to blow, and to purify the
wretched town. The deaths began to decrease, the red crosses slowly to
disappear, the fugitives to return, the shops to open, pale frightened
faces to be seen in the streets. The Plague had been in every part of
England, but in close and unwholesome London it had killed one hundred
thousand people.

All this time, the Merry Monarch was as merry as ever,