where they knew him, and would give him drink and victuals, and sometimes farthings; and he in return would pipe and sing, and talk simply, which diverted the people; and thus he lived.  It was but a very bad time for this diversion while things were as I have told; yet the poor fellow went about as usual, but was almost starved:  and when anybody asked how he did, he would answer, the dead cart had not taken him yet, but that they had promised to call for him next week.

It happened one night that this poor fellow, whether somebody had given him too much drink or no (John Hayward said he had not drink in his house, but that they had given him a little more victuals than ordinary at a public house in Coleman Street), and the poor fellow having not usually had a bellyful, or perhaps not a good while, was laid all along upon the top of a bulk or stall, and fast asleep at a door in the street near London Wall, towards Cripplegate; and that, upon the same bulk or stall, the people of some house in the alley of which the house was a corner, hearing a bell (which they always rung before the cart came), had laid a body really dead of the plague just by him, thinking too that this poor fellow had been a dead body as the other was, and laid there by some of the neighbors.

Accordingly, when John Hayward with his bell and the cart came along, finding two dead bodies lie upon the stall, they took them up with the instrument they used, and threw them into the cart; and all this while the piper slept soundly.

From hence they passed along, and took in other dead bodies, till, as honest John Hayward told me, they almost buried him alive in the cart; yet all this while he slept soundly.  At length the cart came to the place where the bodies were to be thrown into the ground, which, as I do remember, was at Mountmill; and, as the cart usually stopped some time before they were ready to shoot out the melancholy load they had in it, as soon as the cart stopped, the fellow awaked, and struggled a little to get his head out from among the dead bodies; when, raising himself up in the cart, he called out, “Hey, where am I?” This frighted the fellow that attended about the work; but, after some pause, John Hayward, recovering himself, said, “Lord bless us!  There’s somebody in the cart not quite dead!” So another called to him, and said, “Who are you?” The fellow answered, “I am the poor piper.  Where am I?”—­“Where are you?” says Hayward.  “Why, you are in the dead cart, and we are going to bury you.”—­“But I ain’t dead, though, am I?” says the piper; which made them laugh a little, though, as John said, they were heartily frightened at first.  So they helped the poor fellow down, and he went about his business.

I know the story goes, he set up[148] his pipes in the cart, and frighted the bearers and others, so that they ran away; but John Hayward did not tell the story so, nor say anything of his piping at all.  But that he was a poor piper, and that he was carried away as above, I am fully satisfied of the truth of.