The great plague of London took place in 1665, one year before the
fire. The awful scenes which the whole city presented, no pen can
describe. A hundred thousand persons are said to have died. The houses
where cases of the plague existed were marked with a red cross and
shut up, the inmates being all fastened in, to live or die, at the
mercy of the infection. Every day carts rolled through the otherwise
silent and desolate streets, men accompanying them to gather up with
pitchforks the dead bodies which had been dragged out from the
dwellings, and crying "Bring out your dead" as they went along.
[Footnote: Sometimes the living were pitched into the cart by mistake
instead of the dead. There is a piece of sculpture in the Tottenham
Court road in London intended to commemorate the following case. A
Scotch piper, who had been wandering in homeless misery about the
streets, with nothing but his bagpipes and his dog, got intoxicated
at last, as such men always do, if they can, in times of such extreme
and awful danger, and laid down upon the steps of a public building
and went to sleep.
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