o find something for them to eat, and never coming back.
Then the eldest boy would begin to be afraid that she had caught the
plague and had died in the streets, and he would leave his little
sisters and brothers and creep along the streets until he met the awful
death-cart; and then he would ask, and perhaps the man would tell him
where to go to find out about his mother, and someone might be able to
describe a woman who had fallen down in the street seized by the plague,
and had at once been carried off and buried. The boy would guess that
that must have been his mother; and yet he could never be quite certain,
for she had been buried in a plague-pit with dozens of others, and he
would never see her. Perhaps he would beg a little oatmeal, and run back
hastily to his brothers and sisters, and when he got there find them all
frightened and crying, for the eldest girl was very sick. He might turn
down her dress, and see on her neck the awful plague-spot, and know that
she, too, would die. And very likely by the next day the whole of that
family would be dead. Many people must have died of starvation, for all
work was stopped, but for the money given by charitable persons. The
King himself gave L1,000 a week.

There is a story of a man who had a good deal of money, and he shut
himself and his household up in his house, and allowed no member of his
family to go out. The doors and windows were closed, so that it was all
dark, and food was only got by tying a basket to a string and letting it
down at a certain time each day, when a person who had been paid to do
so filled it with food. In the morning the whole family had breakfast
together in a lower room, and afterwards the children were sent up to
play in the garret. In this way the greatest danger of infection was
escaped.

Of course, so soon as foreign nations heard of the plague they sent no
more ships to England, and instead of being covered with vessels from
all lands, the Thames was deserted and silent. Worse than that, numbers
of people threw the dead bodies of their friends who had died into the
water, and these floated down with the tide, or, catching in some pier
or beside some boat, hung there until the air was filled with the
dreadful smell of the rotting bodies. Cats and dogs were drowned, too,
for fear that they should carry the infection, and their dead bodies
made the river loathsome. Everywhere there were awful sights and sounds
and smells; not even by th