oiner or carpenter by trade, a handy fellow, and he
had no wealth but his box or basket of tools, with the help of which he
could at any time get his living, such a time as this excepted, wherever
he went--and he lived near Shadwell.

They all lived in Stepney parish, which, as I have said, being the last
that was infected, or at least violently, they stayed there till they
evidently saw the plague was abating at the west part of the town, and
coming towards the east, where they lived.

The story of those three men, if the reader will be content to have me
give it in their own persons, without taking upon me to either vouch the
particulars or answer for any mistakes, I shall give as distinctly as I
can, believing the history will be a very good pattern for any poor man
to follow, in case the like public desolation should happen here; and if
there may be no such occasion, which God of His infinite mercy grant us,
still the story may have its uses so many ways as that it will, I hope,
never be said that the relating has been unprofitable.

I say all this previous to the history, having yet, for the present,
much more to say before I quit my own part.

I went all the first part of the time freely about the streets, though
not so freely as to run myself into apparent danger, except when they
dug the great pit in the churchyard of our parish of Aldgate. A terrible
pit it was, and I could not resist my curiosity to go and see it.
As near as I may judge, it was about forty feet in length, and about
fifteen or sixteen feet broad, and at the time I first looked at it,
about nine feet deep; but it was said they dug it near twenty feet
deep afterwards in one part of it, till they could go no deeper for the
water; for they had, it seems, dug several large pits before this. For
though the plague was long a-coming to our parish, yet, when it did
come, there was no parish in or about London where it raged with such
violence as in the two parishes of Aldgate and Whitechappel.

I say they had dug several pits in another ground, when the distemper
began to spread in our parish, and especially when the dead-carts began
to go about, which was not, in our parish, till the beginning of August.
Into these pits they had put perhaps fifty or sixty bodies each; then
they made larger holes wherein they buried all that the cart brought in
a week, which, by the middle to the end of August, came to from 200
to 400 a week; and they could not well