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And soon, “But, Lord! how sad a sight it is to see the streets empty of people and very few upon the ’Change. Jealous of every door that one sees shut up, lest it should be the Plague; and about us two shops in three, if not more, generally shut up.”

Reports are terrible of the thousands who every week are carried to their graves in the long pits; and with an even closer terror speaks the record of the veracious diarist. “I went forth and walked towards Moorfields (August 30th) to see (God forgive me my presumption!) whether I could see any dead corpse going to the grave; but, as God would have it, did not. But, Lord! how everybody looks, and discourse on the streets is of death, and nothing else, and few people going up and down, that the town is like a place distressed and forsaken.” “What a sad time it is,” he writes on 20th September, “to see no boats upon the river; and grass grows up and down White Hall Court, and nobody but poor wretches in the streets.”

To these records the genius of Defoe adds an immortal picture. “As this puts me upon mentioning my walking the Streets and Fields”—he has been speaking of the numbers that fled to the outskirts of the town, “into the Fields and Woods, and into secret uncouth Places, almost anywhere to creep into a Bush, or Hedge, and die,” and how it “was a general Method to walk away” if any one was seen coming—“I cannot omit taking notice what a desolate place the City was at that time. The great street I lived in, which is known to be one of the broadest of all the streets of London, I mean of the Suburbs as well as the Liberties; all the side where the Butchers lived, especially without the Bars, was more like a green Field than a paved Street, and the People generally went in the middle with the Horses and Carts. It is true that the farthest End, towards White-Chappel Church, was not all pav’d, but even the part that was pav’d was full of Grass also; but this need not seem strange, since the great Streets within the City, such as Leaden-Hall Street, Bishopgate-Street, Cornhill, and even the Exchange itself, had Grass growing in them, in several Places; neither Cart nor Coach were seen in the Streets from Morning to Evening, except some Country Carts to bring Roots and Beans, or Pease, Hay and Straw, to the Market, and those but very few, compared to what was usual: as for Coaches, they were scarce used, but to carry sick People to the Pest-House, and to other Hospitals; and some few to carry Physicians to such Places as they thought fit to venture to visit; for really coaches were dangerous things, and People did not Care to venture into them because they did not know who might have been carried in them last; and sick infected People were, as I have said, ordinarily carried in them to the Pest-Houses, and some times People expired in them as they went along.