e.

John. Look you, Tom, the whole kingdom is my native country as well as
this town. You may as well say I must not go out of my house if it is
on fire as that I must not go out of the town I was born in when it is
infected with the plague. I was born in England, and have a right to
live in it if I can.

Thomas. But you know every vagrant person may by the laws of England be
taken up, and passed back to their last legal settlement.

John. But how shall they make me vagrant? I desire only to travel on,
upon my lawful occasions.

Thomas. What lawful occasions can we pretend to travel, or rather wander
upon? They will not be put off with words.

John. Is not flying to save our lives a lawful occasion? And do they not
all know that the fact is true? We cannot be said to dissemble.

Thomas. But suppose they let us pass, whither shall we go?

John. Anywhere, to save our lives; it is time enough to consider that
when we are got out of this town. If I am once out of this dreadful
place, I care not where I go.

Thomas. We shall be driven to great extremities. I know not what to
think of it.

John. Well, Tom, consider of it a little.

This was about the beginning of July; and though the plague was come
forward in the west and north parts of the town, yet all Wapping, as
I have observed before, and Redriff, and Ratdiff, and Limehouse, and
Poplar, in short, Deptford and Greenwich, all both sides of the river
from the Hermitage, and from over against it, quite down to Blackwall,
was entirely free; there had not one person died of the plague in all
Stepney parish, and not one on the south side of Whitechappel Road, no,
not in any parish; and yet the weekly bill was that very week risen up
to 1006.

It was a fortnight after this before the two brothers met again, and
then the case was a little altered, and the' plague was exceedingly
advanced and the number greatly increased; the bill was up at 2785, and
prodigiously increasing, though still both sides of the river, as below,
kept pretty well. But some began to die in Redriff, and about five or
six in Ratdiff Highway, when the sailmaker came to his brother John
express, and in some fright; for he was absolutely warned out of his
lodging, and had only a week to provide himself. His brother John was
in as bad a case, for he was quite out, and had only begged leave of
his master, the biscuit-maker, to lodge in an outhouse belonging to his
workhouse, where he only lay upon