rise. Going
one day through Aldgate, and a pretty many people being passing and
repassing, there comes a man out of the end of the Minories, and looking
a little up the street and down, he throws his hands abroad, 'Lord, what
an alteration is here I Why, last week I came along here, and hardly
anybody was to be seen.' Another man--I heard him--adds to his words,
''Tis all wonderful; 'tis all a dream.' 'Blessed be God,' says a third
man, and and let us give thanks to Him, for 'tis all His own doing, human
help and human skill was at an end.' These were all strangers to one
another. But such salutations as these were frequent in the street every
day; and in spite of a loose behaviour, the very common people went
along the streets giving God thanks for their deliverance.

It was now, as I said before, the people had cast off all apprehensions,
and that too fast; indeed we were no more afraid now to pass by a man
with a white cap upon his head, or with a doth wrapt round his neck, or
with his leg limping, occasioned by the sores in his groin, all which
were frightful to the last degree, but the week before. But now the
street was full of them, and these poor recovering creatures, give them
their due, appeared very sensible of their unexpected deliverance; and
I should wrong them very much if I should not acknowledge that I
believe many of them were really thankful. But I must own that, for the
generality of the people, it might too justly be said of them as was
said of the children of Israel after their being delivered from the host
of Pharaoh, when they passed the Red Sea, and looked back and saw the
Egyptians overwhelmed in the water: viz., that they sang His praise, but
they soon forgot His works.

I can go no farther here. I should be counted censorious, and perhaps
unjust, if I should enter into the unpleasing work of reflecting,
whatever cause there was for it, upon the unthankfulness and return of
all manner of wickedness among us, which I was so much an eye-witness of
myself. I shall conclude the account of this calamitous year therefore
with a coarse but sincere stanza of my own, which I placed at the end of
my ordinary memorandums the same year they were written:--

A dreadful plague in London was
In the year sixty-five,
Which swept an hundred thousand souls
Away; yet I alive!

H. F.

End of Project Gutenberg's A Journal of the Plague Year, by Daniel Defoe

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