rm (this was a sure sign), and sometimes
by swellings on the neck. As the plague grew worse men dropped down in
the streets seized with it, and before their friends could be found they
were dead. All sorts of odd things were offered in order to keep away
the infection. One, that a great many foolish people believed in, was a
dried toad strung on a string round the neck--as if that could have made
anyone safe!

Very soon all the rich people left London and fled away into the
country, though, of course, the country people did not want them, for
fear that they had brought the infection. But there were hundreds and
hundreds of people who stayed in London and even tried to carry on their
business. At first they struggled bravely and pretended nothing was the
matter, but very soon this was impossible.

You could not imagine what London looked like then. No one drove in the
streets, no one walked there if he could help it; grass grew up between
the cobble-stones, and nearly all the houses had shutters up, showing
that their inhabitants had gone away. A nurse would come quickly along
holding a little red staff in her hand to show she had been nursing a
plague patient, and that other people had better avoid her. Then slowly
down the street would come a cart, with a man walking beside the horse,
and he would call out: 'Bring out your dead! bring out your dead!' just
as if he were shouting to sell coals. And in the cart were the bodies of
the people who had died of the plague. It was extraordinary that any man
could be found to drive that cart, and he had to have very high wages;
and even then he must have been a low sort of man, without any
imagination, a man who did not mind much what his work was so long as he
had some money to spend in drink. One of these men was sitting on his
cart one day when it was noticed that he seemed to be ill, and the next
moment he fell off dead, having caught the plague.

When people were dying by hundreds and hundreds there was no time to
bury them properly: and yet they had to be buried, or the dead bodies
would make it impossible for anyone to live at all. So great pits were
dug many yards wide, and into these the bodies of men, women, and
children were put in rows and rows, one row on the top of another, and
the whole covered in with stuff called quicklime. Whenever anyone began
with the plague, it was the duty of the head of the household to see
that a red cross was marked on his door as a wa