many people
fled out of the city, and out of the infected suburbs, to Wapping,
Ratcliff, Limehouse, Poplar, and such Places, as to Places of security;
and it is not at all unlikely that their doing this helped to bring the
plague that way faster than it might otherwise have come. For though I
am much for people flying away and emptying such a town as this upon the
first appearance of a like visitation, and that all people who have any
possible retreat should make use of it in time and be gone, yet I must
say, when all that will fly are gone, those that are left and must stand
it should stand stock-still where they are, and not shift from one end
of the town or one part of the town to the other; for that is the bane
and mischief of the whole, and they carry the plague from house to house
in their very clothes.

Wherefore were we ordered to kill all the dogs and cats, but because as
they were domestic animals, and are apt to run from house to house and
from street to street, so they are capable of carrying the effluvia or
infectious streams of bodies infected even in their furs and hair? And
therefore it was that, in the beginning of the infection, an order was
published by the Lord Mayor, and by the magistrates, according to
the advice of the physicians, that all the dogs and cats should be
immediately killed, and an officer was appointed for the execution.

It is incredible, if their account is to be depended upon, what a
prodigious number of those creatures were destroyed. I think they talked
of forty thousand dogs, and five times as many cats; few houses being
without a cat, some having several, sometimes five or six in a house.
All possible endeavours were used also to destroy the mice and rats,
especially the latter, by laying ratsbane and other poisons for them,
and a prodigious multitude of them were also destroyed.

I often reflected upon the unprovided condition that the whole body of
the people were in at the first coming of this calamity upon them, and
how it was for want of timely entering into measures and managements,
as well public as private, that all the confusions that followed were
brought upon us, and that such a prodigious number of people sank in
that disaster, which, if proper steps had been taken, might, Providence
concurring, have been avoided, and which, if posterity think fit, they
may take a caution and warning from. But I shall come to this part
again.

I come back to my three men. Their