"For the last week the distemper has raged fearfully—fearfully, indeed," said Rainbird; "but yesterday and to-day have far exceeded all that have gone before. The distempered have died quicker than cattle of the murrain. I visited upwards of a hundred houses in the Borough this morning, and only found ten persons alive; and out of those ten, not one, I will venture to say, is alive now. It will, in truth, be a mercy if they are gone. There were distracted mothers raving over their children,—a young husband lamenting his wife,—two little children weeping over their dead parents, with none to attend them, none to feed them,—an old man mourning over his son cut off in his prime. In short, misery and distress in their worst form,—the streets ringing with shrieks and groans, and the numbers of dead so great that it was impossible to carry them off. You remember Solomon Eagle's prophecy?"
"Perfectly," replied Leonard; "and I lament to see its fulfilment."
"'The streets shall be covered with grass, and the living shall not be able to bury their dead,'—so it ran," said Rainbird. "And it has come to pass. Not a carriage of any description, save the dead-cart, is to be seen in the broadest streets of London, which are now as green as the fields without her walls, and as silent as the grave itself. Terrible times, as I said before—terrible times! The dead are rotting in heaps in the courts, in the alleys, in the very houses, and no one to remove them. What will be the end of it all? What will become of this great city?"
"It is not difficult to foresee what will become of it," replied Leonard, "unless it pleases the Lord to stay his vengeful arm. And something whispers in my ear that we are now at the worst. The scourge cannot exceed its present violence without working our ruin; and deeply as we have sinned, little as we repent, I cannot bring myself to believe that God will sweep his people entirely from the face of the earth."
"I dare not hope otherwise," rejoined Rainbird, "though I would fain do so. I discern no symptoms of abatement of the distemper, but, on the contrary, an evident increase of malignity, and such is the opinion of all I have spoken with on the subject. Chowles told me he buried two hundred more yesterday than he had ever done before, and yet he did not carry a third of the dead to the plague-pit. He is a strange fellow that Chowles. But for his passion for his horrible calling there is no necessity for him to follow it, for he is now one of the richest men in London."
"He must have amassed his riches by robbery, then," remarked Leonard.
"True," returned Rainbird. "He helps himself without scruple to the clothes, goods, and other property, of all who die of the pestilence; and after ransacking their houses, conveys his plunder in the dead-cart to his own dwelling."
"In Saint Paul's?" asked Leonard.
"No—a large house in Nicholas-lane, once belonging to a wealthy merchant, who perished, with his family, of the plague," replied Rainbird. "He has filled it from cellar to garret with the spoil he has obtained."
"And how has he preserved it?" inquired the apprentice.