Sometimes heaps and throngs of people would burst out of the alley, most of them women, making a dreadful clamour, mixed or compounded of screeches, cryings, and calling one another, that we could not conceive what to make of it.  Almost all the dead part of the night the dead-cart stood at the end of that alley, for if it went in it could not well turn again, and could go in but a little way.  There, I say, it stood to receive dead bodies, and as the churchyard was but a little way off, if it went away full it would soon be back again.  It is impossible to describe the most horrible cries and noise the poor people would make at their bringing the dead bodies of their children and friends out of the cart, and by the number one would have thought there had been none left behind, or that there were people enough for a small city living in those places.  Several times they cried ‘Murder’, sometimes ‘Fire’; but it was easy to perceive it was all distraction, and the complaints of distressed and distempered people.

I believe it was everywhere thus as that time, for the plague raged for six or seven weeks beyond all that I have expressed, and came even to such a height that, in the extremity, they began to break into that excellent order of which I have spoken so much in behalf of the magistrates; namely, that no dead bodies were seen in the street or burials in the daytime:  for there was a necessity in this extremity to bear with its being otherwise for a little while.

One thing I cannot omit here, and indeed I thought it was extraordinary, at least it seemed a remarkable hand of Divine justice:  viz., that all the predictors, astrologers, fortune-tellers, and what they called cunning-men, conjurers, and the like:  calculators of nativities and dreamers of dream, and such people, were gone and vanished; not one of them was to be found.  I am verily persuaded that a great number of them fell in the heat of the calamity, having ventured to stay upon the prospect of getting great estates; and indeed their gain was but too great for a time, through the madness and folly of the people.  But now they were silent; many of them went to their long home, not able to foretell their own fate or to calculate their own nativities.  Some have been critical enough to say that every one of them died.  I dare not affirm that; but this I must own, that I never heard of one of them that ever appeared after the calamity was over.

But to return to my particular observations during this dreadful part of the visitation.  I am now come, as I have said, to the month of September, which was the most dreadful of its kind, I believe, that ever London saw; for, by all the accounts which I have seen of the preceding visitations which have been in London, nothing has been like it, the number in the weekly bill amounting to almost 40,000 from the 22nd of August to the 26th of September, being but five weeks.  The particulars of the bills are as follows, viz.:—­