Here I saw a poor man walking on the bank, or sea-wall, as they call it, by himself.  I walked a while also about, seeing the houses all shut up.  At last I fell into some talk, at a distance, with this poor man; first I asked him how people did thereabouts.  ‘Alas, sir!’ says he, ’almost desolate; all dead or sick.  Here are very few families in this part, or in that village’ (pointing at Poplar), ’where half of them are not dead already, and the rest sick.’  Then he pointing to one house, ’There they are all dead’, said he, ’and the house stands open; nobody dares go into it.  A poor thief’, says he, ’ventured in to steal something, but he paid dear for his theft, for he was carried to the churchyard too last night.’  Then he pointed to several other houses.  ‘There’, says he, ’they are all dead, the man and his wife, and five children.  There’, says he, ‘they are shut up; you see a watchman at the door’; and so of other houses.  ‘Why,’ says I, ‘what do you here all alone?’ ‘Why,’ says he, ’I am a poor, desolate man; it has pleased God I am not yet visited, though my family is, and one of my children dead.’  ‘How do you mean, then,’ said I, ‘that you are not visited?’ ‘Why,’ says he, ‘that’s my house’ (pointing to a very little, low-boarded house), ’and there my poor wife and two children live,’ said he, ’if they may be said to live, for my wife and one of the children are visited, but I do not come at them.’  And with that word I saw the tears run very plentifully down his face; and so they did down mine too, I assure you.

‘But,’ said I, ’why do you not come at them?  How can you abandon your own flesh and blood?’ ‘Oh, sir,’ says he, ’the Lord forbid!  I do not abandon them; I work for them as much as I am able; and, blessed be the Lord, I keep them from want’; and with that I observed he lifted up his eyes to heaven, with a countenance that presently told me I had happened on a man that was no hypocrite, but a serious, religious, good man, and his ejaculation was an expression of thankfulness that, in such a condition as he was in, he should be able to say his family did not want.  ‘Well,’ says I, ’honest man, that is a great mercy as things go now with the poor.  But how do you live, then, and how are you kept from the dreadful calamity that is now upon us all?’ ‘Why, sir,’ says he, ’I am a waterman, and there’s my boat,’ says he, ’and the boat serves me for a house.  I work in it in the day, and I sleep in it in the night; and what I get I lay down upon that stone,’ says he, showing me a broad stone on the other side of the street, a good way from his house; ’and then,’ says he, ’I halloo, and call to them till I make them hear; and they come and fetch it.’