I must acknowledge that this time was so terrible that I was sometimes at the end of all my resolutions, and that I had not the courage that I had at the beginning.  As the extremity brought other people abroad, it drove me home; and, except having made my voyage down to Blackwall and Greenwich, as I have related, which was an excursion, I kept afterwards very much within doors, as I had for about a fortnight before.  I have said already that I repented several times that I had ventured to stay in town, and had not gone away with my brother and his family; but it was too late for that now.  And after I had retreated and staid within doors a good while before my impatience led me abroad, then they called me, as I have said, to an ugly and dangerous office, which brought me out again; but as that was expired, while the height of the distemper lasted I retired again, and continued close ten or twelve days more, during which many dismal spectacles represented themselves in my view,[249] out of my own windows, and in our own street, as that particularly, from Harrow Alley, of the poor outrageous creature who danced and sung in his agony; and many others there were.  Scarce a day or a night passed over but some dismal thing or other happened at the end of that Harrow Alley, which was a place full of poor people, most of them belonging to the butchers, or to employments depending upon the butchery.

Sometimes heaps and throngs of people would burst out of the alley, most of them women, making a dreadful clamor, 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,[250] 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 to 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 that it was all distraction and the complaints of distressed and distempered people.

I believe it was everywhere thus at 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 streets, or burials in the daytime; for there was a necessity in this extremity to bear with its being otherwise for a little while.