on the west and north sides into those eastern and south sides, as for safety, and, as I verily believe, carried the plague amongst them there, perhaps sooner than they would otherwise have had it.

Here also I ought to leave a further mark for the use of posterity, concerning the manner of people's infecting one another, namely, that it was not the sick people only from whom the plague was immediately received by others that were sound, but the well. To explain myself: by the sick people I mean those who were known to be sick, had taken their beds, had been under cure, or had swellings and tumours upon them, and the like; these everybody could beware of, they were either in their beds or in such condition as could not be concealed.

By the well I mean such as had received the contagion, and had it really upon them and in their blood, yet did not show the consequences of it in their countenances, nay, even were not sensible of it themselves, as many were not for several days. These breathed death in every place and upon everybody who came near them; nay, their very clothes retained the infection, their hands would infect the things they touched, especially if they were warm and sweaty, and they were generally apt to

sweat too.

Now it was impossible to know these people, nor did they sometimes, as I have said, know themselves to be infected: these were the people that so often dropped down and fainted in the streets; for oftentimes they would go about the streets to the last, till on a sudden they would sweat, grow faint, sit down at a door, and die. It is true, finding themselves thus, they would struggle hard to get home to their own doors, or at other times would be just able to go into their houses and die instantly; other times they would go about till they had the very tokens come out upon them, and yet not know it, and would die in an hour or two after they came home, but be well as long as they were abroad. These were the dangerous people; these were the people of whom the well people ought to have been afraid; but then, on the other side, it was impossible to know them.

And this is the reason why it is impossible in a visitation to prevent the spreading of the plague by the utmost human vigilance, viz., that it is impossible to know the infected people from the sound; or that the infected people should perfectly know themselves. I knew a man who conversed freely in London all the season of the plague in 1665, and kept about him an antidote.

or cordial, on purpose to take when he thought himself in any danger, and he had such a rule to know, or have warning of the danger by, as indeed I never met with before or since; how far it may be depended on I know not. He had a wound in his leg, and whenever he came among any people that were not sound, and the infection began to affect him, he said he could know it by that signal, viz., that his wound in his leg would smart, and look pale and white; so as soon as ever he felt it smart it was time for him to withdraw, or to take care of himself, taking his drink, which he always carried about him for that purpose. Now it seems he found his wound would smart many times when he was in company with such who thought themselves to be sound, and who appeared so to one another; but he would presently rise up, and say publicly,—" Friends, here is somebody in the room that has the plague;" and so would immediately break up the company. This was indeed a faithful monitor to all people, that the plague is not to be avoided by those that converse promiscuously in a town infected, and people have it when they know it not, and that they likewise give it to others when they know not that they have it themselves; and in this case shutting up the well or removing the sick will not do it, unless they can go back and shut up all those that the sick had conversed with, even before they knew themselves to be sick, and none knows how far to carry that back, or where to stop; for none knows when, or where, or how they may have received the infection, or from whom.

This I take to be the reason which makes so many people talk of the air being corrupted and infected, and that they need not be cautious of whom they converse with, for that the contagion was in the air. I have seen them in strange agitations and surprises on this account. "I have never come near any infected body!" says the disturbed person. "I have conversed with none but sound healthy people, and yet I have gotten the distemper!"-"I am sure I am struck from heaven," says another, and he falls to the serious part. Again, the first goes on exclaiming, "I have come ncar no infection, or any infected person: I am sure it is in the air: we draw in death when we breathe, and therefore it is the hand of God; there is no withstanding it." And this at last made many people, being hardened to the danger, grow less concerned at it, and less cautious towards the latter end of the time, and when it was come to its height, than they were at first; then, with a kind

of a Turkish predestinarianism, they would say, if it pleased Turkish predestiGod to strike them it was all one whether they went abroad or narianism. stayed at home, they could not escape it, and therefore they went boldly about, even into infected houses and infected company, visited sick people, and, in short, lay in the beds with their wives or relations when they were infected, and what was the consequence but the same that is the consequence in Turkey, and in those countries where they do those things; namely, that they were infected too, and died by hundreds and thousands?

Jeremiah.

I would be far from lessening the awe of the judgments of God, and the reverence to his Providence, which ought always to be on our minds on such occasions as these: doubtless the visitation itself is a stroke from heaven upon a city, or country, or nation where it falls; a messenger of his vengeance, and a loud call to that nation, or country, or city, to humiliation and repentance, according to that of the prophet Jeremiah, xviii. Prophet 7, 8, "At what instant I shall speak concerning a nation, and concerning a kingdom, to pluck up, and to pull down, and destroy it if that nation against whom I have pronounced turn from their evil, I will repent of the evil that I thought to do unto them." Now to prompt due impressions of the awe of God on the minds of men on such occasions, and not to lessen them, it is that I have left those minutes upon record.

I say, therefore, I reflect upon no man for putting the reason of those things upon the immediate hand of God, and the appointment and direction of his Providence; nay, on the contrary, there were many wonderful deliverances of persons from infection, and deliverances of persons when infected, which intimate singular and remarkable Providence in the particular instances to which they refer: and I esteem my own deliverance to be one next to miraculous, and do record it with thankfulness.

But when I am speaking of the plague as a distemper arising from natural causes, we must consider it as it was really propagated by natural means, nor is it at all the less a judgment for its being under the conduct of human causes and effects; for as the divine power has formed the whole scheme of nature, and maintains nature in its course, so the same power thinks fit to let his own actings with men, whether of mercy or judgment, to go on in the ordinary course of natural causes, and he is pleased to act by those natural causes as the ordinary means;

excepting and reserving to himself nevertheless a power to act in a supernatural way when he sees occasion. Now it is evident that, in the case of an infection, there is no apparent extraordinary occasion for supernatural operation, but the ordinary course of things appears sufficiently armed, and made capable of all the effects that heaven usually directs by a contagion. Among these causes and effects this of the secret conveyance of infection, imperceptible and unavoidable, is more than sufficient to execute the fierceness of divine vengeance, without putting it upon supernaturals and miracles.

The acute, penetrating nature of the disease itself was such, and the infection was received so imperceptibly, that the most exact caution could not secure us while in the place; but I must be allowed to believe, and I have so many examples fresh in my memory, to convince me of it, that I think none can resist their evidence; I say, I must be allowed to believe, that no one in this whole nation ever received the sickness or infection but who received it in the ordinary way of infection from somebody, or the clothes, or touch, or stench of somebody that was infected before.

The manner of its coming first to London proves this also, viz., by goods brought over from Holland, and brought thither from the Levant; the first breaking of it out in a house in Long Acre, where those goods were carried and first opened; its spreading from that house to other houses by the visible unwary conversing with those who were sick, and the infecting the parish officers who were employed about persons dead, and the like. These are known authorities for this great foundation point, that it went on and proceeded from person to person, and from house to house, and no otherwise. In the first house that was infected there died four persons; a neighbour, hearing the mistress of the first house was sick, went to visit her, and went home and gave the distemper to her family, and died, and all her household. A minister called to pray with the first sick person in the second house, was said to sicken immediately and die, with several more in his house. Then the physicians began to consider, for they did not at first dream of a general contagion; but the physicians being sent to inspect the bodies, they assured the people that it was neither more or less than the plague, with all its terrifying particulars, and that it threatened an universal infection, so many people having already conversed with the sick or distempered, and having, as might be supposed,

received infection from them, that it would be impossible to put a stop to it.

De Foe.

Here the opinion of the physicians agreed with my observa- Physicians tion afterwards, namely, that the danger was spreading in- agree with sensibly; for the sick could infect none but those that came within reach of the sick person, but that one man, who may have really received the infection, and knows it not, but goes abroad and about as a sound person, may give the plague to a thousand people, and they to greater numbers in proportion, and neither the person giving the infection, nor the persons receiving it, know anything of it, and perhaps not feel the effects of it for several days after.

For example:-Many persons in the time of this visitation never perceived that they were infected till they found, to their unspeakable surprise, the tokens come out upon them, after which they seldom lived six hours; for those spots they called the tokens were really gangrene spots, or mortified flesh in small knobs as broad as a little silver penny, and hard as a piece of callus or horn; so that when the disease was come up to that length, there was nothing could follow but certain death, and yet, as I said, they knew nothing of their being infected, nor found themselves so much as out of order till those mortal marks were upon them; but everybody must allow that they were infected in a high degree before, and must have been so some time, and consequently their breath, their sweat, their very clothes, were contagious for many days before.

This occasioned a vast variety of cases, which physicians would have much more opportunity to remember than I; but some came within the compass of my observation or hearing, of which I shall name a few.

A certain citizen who had lived safe and untouched till the month of September, when the weight of the distemper lay more in the city than it had done before, was mighty cheerful, and something too bold, as I think it was, in his talk of how secure he was, how cautious he had been, and how he had never come near any sick body: says another citizen (a neighbour of his) to him one day, "Do not be too confident, Mr., it is hard to say who is sick and who is well; for we see men alive and well, to outward appearance, one hour, and dead the next."-"That is true," says the first man, for he was not a man presumptuously secure, but had escaped a long while, and men, as I have said above, especially in the city, began to be over easy on that