en of itself; and the
malignity declining, as I have said, though infinite numbers were sick,
yet fewer died, and the very first weeks' bill decreased 1843; a vast
number indeed!

It is impossible to express the change that appeared in the very
countenances of the people that Thursday morning when the weekly bill
came out. It might have been perceived in their countenances that a
secret surprise and smile of joy sat on everybody's face. They shook
one another by the hands in the streets, who would hardly go on the same
side of the way with one another before. Where the streets were not too
broad they would open their windows and call from one house to another,
and ask how they did, and if they had heard the good news that the
plague was abated. Some would return, when they said good news, and ask,
'What good news?' and when they answered that the plague was abated and
the bills decreased almost two thousand, they would cry out, 'God be
praised I' and would weep aloud for joy, telling them they had heard
nothing of it; and such was the joy of the people that it was, as it
were, life to them from the grave. I could almost set down as many
extravagant things done in the excess of their joy as of their grief;
but that would be to lessen the value of it.

I must confess myself to have been very much dejected just before this
happened; for the prodigious number that were taken sick the week or two
before, besides those that died, was such, and the lamentations were so
great everywhere, that a man must have seemed to have acted even against
his reason if he had so much as expected to escape; and as there was
hardly a house but mine in all my neighbourhood but was infected, so had
it gone on it would not have been long that there would have been
any more neighbours to be infected. Indeed it is hardly credible what
dreadful havoc the last three weeks had made, for if I might believe the
person whose calculations I always found very well grounded, there were
not less than 30,000 people dead and near 100.000 fallen sick in the
three weeks I speak of; for the number that sickened was surprising,
indeed it was astonishing, and those whose courage upheld them all the
time before, sank under it now.

In the middle of their distress, when the condition of the city of
London was so truly calamitous, just then it pleased God--as it were by
His immediate hand to disarm this enemy; the poison was taken out of the
sting. It was wonderful