I could tell here dismal stories of living infants being found sucking the breasts of their mothers or nurses after they have been dead of the plague; of a mother in the parish where I lived, who, having a child that was not well, sent for an apothecary to view the child, and when he came, as the relation goes, was giving the child suck at her breast, and to all appearance was herself very well; but, when the apothecary came close to her, he saw the tokens upon that breast with which she was suckling the child.  He was surprised enough, to be sure; but, not willing to fright the poor woman too much, he desired she would give the child into his hand:  so he takes the child, and, going to a cradle in the room, lays it in, and, opening its clothes, found the tokens upon the child too; and both died before he could get home to send a preventive medicine to the father of the child, to whom he had told their condition.  Whether the child infected the nurse mother, or the mother the child, was not certain, but the last most likely.

Likewise of a child brought home to the parents from a nurse that had died of the plague; yet the tender mother would not refuse to take in her child, and laid it in her bosom, by which she was infected and died, with the child in her arms dead also.

It would make the hardest heart move at the instances that were frequently found of tender mothers tending and watching with their dear children, and even dying before them, and sometimes taking the distemper from them, and dying, when the child for whom the affectionate heart had been sacrificed has got over it and escaped.

I have heard also of some who, on the death of their relations, have grown stupid with the insupportable sorrow; and of one in particular, who was so absolutely overcome with the pressure upon his spirits, that by degrees his head sunk into his body so between his shoulders, that the crown of his head was very little seen above the bone of his shoulders; and by degrees, losing both voice and sense, his face, looking forward, lay against his collar bone, and could not be kept up any otherwise, unless held up by the hands of other people.  And the poor man never came to himself again, but languished near a year in that condition, and died.  Nor was he ever once seen to lift up his eyes, or to look upon any particular object.[184]

I cannot undertake to give any other than a summary of such passages as these, because it was not possible to come at the particulars where sometimes the whole families where such things happened were carried off by the distemper; but there were innumerable cases of this kind which presented[185] to the eye and the ear, even in passing along the streets, as I have hinted above.  Nor is it easy to give any story of this or that family, which there was not divers parallel stories to be met with of the same kind.