I remember, and while I am writing this story I think I hear the very sound of it:  a certain lady had an only daughter, a young maiden about nineteen years old, and who was possessed of a very considerable fortune.  They were only lodgers in the house where they were.  The young woman, her mother, and the maid had been abroad on some occasion, I do not remember what, for the house was not shut up; but about two hours after they came home, the young lady complained she was not well; in a quarter of an hour more she vomited, and had a violent pain in her head.  “Pray God,” says her mother, in a terrible fright, “my child has not the distemper!” The pain in her head increasing, her mother ordered the bed to be warmed, and resolved to put her to bed, and prepared to give her things to sweat, which was the ordinary remedy to be taken when the first apprehensions of the distemper began.

While the bed was airing, the mother undressed the young woman, and just as she was laid down in the bed, she, looking upon her body with a candle, immediately discovered the fatal tokens on the inside of her thighs.  Her mother, not being able to contain herself, threw down her candle, and screeched out in such a frightful manner, that it was enough to place horror upon the stoutest heart in the world.  Nor was it one scream, or one cry, but, the fright having seized her spirits, she fainted first, then recovered, then ran all over the house (up the stairs and down the stairs) like one distracted, and indeed really was distracted, and continued screeching and crying out for several hours, void of all sense, or at least government of her senses, and, as I was told, never came thoroughly to herself again.  As to the young maiden, she was a dead corpse from that moment:  for the gangrene, which occasions the spots, had spread over her whole body, and she died in less than two hours.  But still the mother continued crying out, not knowing anything more of her child, several hours after she was dead.  It is so long ago that I am not certain, but I think the mother never recovered, but died in two or three weeks after.

I have by me a story of two brothers and their kinsman, who, being single men, but that had staid[104] in the city too long to get away, and, indeed, not knowing where to go to have any retreat, nor having wherewith to travel far, took a course for their own preservation, which, though in itself at first desperate, yet was so natural that it may be wondered that no more did so at that time.  They were but of mean condition, and yet not so very poor as that they could not furnish themselves with some little conveniences, such as might serve to keep life and soul together; and finding the distemper increasing in a terrible manner, they resolved to shift as well as they could, and to be gone.

One of them had been a soldier in the late wars,[105] and before that in the Low Countries;[106] and having been bred to no particular employment but his arms, and besides, being wounded, and not able to work very hard, had for some time been employed at a baker’s of sea biscuit, in Wapping.