In that very moment, when we might very well say, “Vain was the help of man,"[350]—­I say, in that very moment it pleased God, with a most agreeable surprise, to cause the fury of it to abate, even of itself; and the malignity declining, as I have said, though infinite numbers were sick, yet fewer died; and the very first week’s bill decreased 1,843, a vast number indeed.

It is impossible to express the change that appeared in the very countenances of the people that Thursday morning when the weekly bill came out.  It might have been perceived in their countenances that a secret surprise and smile of joy sat on everybody’s face.  They shook one another by the hands in the streets, who would hardly go on the same side of the way with one another before.  Where the streets were not too broad, they would open their windows and call from one house to another, and asked how they did, and if they had heard the good news that the plague was abated.  Some would return, when they said good news, and ask, “What good news?” And when they answered that the plague was abated, and the bills decreased almost two thousand, they would cry out, “God be praised!” and would weep aloud for joy, telling them they had heard nothing of it; and such was the joy of the people, that it was, as it were, life to them from the grave.  I could almost set down as many extravagant things done in the excess of their joy as of their grief; but that would be to lessen the value of it.

I must confess myself to have been very much dejected just before this happened; for the prodigious numbers that were taken sick the week or two before, besides those that died, was[351] such, and the lamentations were so great everywhere, that a man must have seemed to have acted even against his reason if he had so much as expected to escape; and as there was hardly a house but mine in all my neighborhood but what was infected, so, had it gone on, it would not have been long that there would have been any more neighbors to be infected.  Indeed, it is hardly credible what dreadful havoc the last three weeks had made:  for, if I might believe the person whose calculations I always found very well grounded, there were not less than thirty thousand people dead, and near one hundred thousand fallen sick, in the three weeks I speak of; for the number that sickened was surprising, indeed it was astonishing, and those whose courage upheld them all the time before, sunk under it now.

In the middle of their distress, when the condition of the city of London was so truly calamitous, just then it pleased God, as it were, by his immediate hand, to disarm this enemy:  the poison was taken out of the sting.  It was wonderful.  Even the physicians themselves were surprised at it.  Wherever they visited, they found their patients better,—­either they had sweated kindly, or the tumors were broke, or the carbuncles went down and the inflammations round them changed color, or the fever was gone, or the violent headache was assuaged, or some good symptom was in the case,—­so that in a few days everybody was recovering.  Whole families that were infected and down, that had ministers praying with them, and expected death every hour, were revived and healed, and none died at all out of them.