e water could anyone escape. When the hot
weather came in summer the plague grew worse; in one week four thousand
persons died of it. Four thousand! It is difficult to imagine. But this
was not the worst: the deaths went on until London was a city of the
dead, and the living were very few. Fathers had lost children, husbands
wives, children parents; there was no household that had not suffered
from the plague. A preacher who used to go about the streets dressed
only in a rough garment of fur like John the Baptist had prophesied that
the grass should grow in the streets, and that the living should not be
able to bury the dead. It was long since the first part of this had been
true, and now the second became true, too. The people who were left were
not enough to bury those who died, and even in the streets the bodies
lay unburied. St. Paul's itself was used as a pest-house--that is to
say, as a hospital for the plague-stricken. We can imagine that the
people who were left alive felt as if they were living in some
nightmare dream from which they could not awake. They must have lost all
hope of ever seeing London restored to itself, and the streets clean and
bright once more. It was not until the summer was past and the cold
weather began that the deaths were fewer, and when the number was only
one thousand a week everyone began to get hopeful again. People who had
fled into the country began to come back, a few shopkeepers opened their
shops, the country people came timidly to bring vegetables for sale, and
so gradually things got a little better.

The houses were cleaned and whitewashed, the streets were cleansed, and
large fires were lit to burn up any rubbish that might still hold
infection. St. Paul's Cathedral was cleaned out, and the beds that the
patients had used were burned, and all seemed better.

Then happened another terrifying thing, even more alarming than the
plague to the unfortunate people who lived in London at that time. One
night, when everyone had gone to bed, the church bells in the city began
tolling, and soon feet were heard hurrying on the streets; cries of
alarm woke even the laziest, and everyone hurried out to see what was
the matter. Against the darkened evening sky they saw a lurid colour
like a crimson flag, and this changed and waved as columns of smoke
passed in front of it; there was no doubt that a big fire had been
lighted somewhere.

At first some may have thought this was only one of