The weather was intensely cold during the whole of the winter. In order to destroy all remains of the contagion, the doors and windows of the rooms in which there had been any persons ill of the plague, were broken and the rooms were fumigated with the antipestilential powder[26]; the old wooden houses were entirely demolished. The effects of the plague were traced in every part of the city. Even as late as the month of February, 1772, upwards of four hundred dead bodies were discovered, which had been secretly buried the year before in private houses. So powerful is cold in destroying the contagion, that not one of those who were employed in digging up these bodies, and carrying them to the public burying-grounds, became infected[27]. The total number of persons carried off by the plague amounted, according to the reports transmitted to the Senate and Council of Health, to upwards of seventy thousand; more than twenty-two thousand of this number of deaths happened in the month of September alone[28]. If we add to these, the private and clandestine interments[29], the whole number of deaths in Moscow will amount to eighty thousand[30]: and reckoning those who died in upwards of four hundred villages, and in the three towns of Tula, Yaroslaw and Kalomna (or Kaluga)[31], it will follow that this plague swept off altogether as many as an hundred thousand persons! For carrying away and burying the dead, criminals capitally convicted or condemned to hard labour, were at first employed; but afterwards, when these were not sufficient for the purpose, the poor were hired to perform this service. Each was provided with a cloke, gloves, and a mask made of oiled cloth; and they were cautioned never to touch a dead body with their bare hands. But they would not attend to these precautions, believing it to be impossible to be hurt by merely touching the bodies or clothes of the dead, and attributing the effects of the contagion to an inevitable destiny. We lost thousands of these people, who seldom remained well beyond a week. I was informed by the Inspectors of Health, that most of them fell ill about the fourth or fifth day. The plague, as is generally the case, raged chiefly among the common people; the nobles and better sort of inhabitants escaped the contagion, a few only excepted, who fell victims to their rashness and negligence. The contagion was communicated solely by contact of the sick or infected goods; it was not propagated by the atmosphere, which appeared in no respect vitiated during the whole of the time. When we visited any of the sick we[32] went so near them that frequently there was not more than a foot's distance between them and us; and although we used no other precaution but that of not touching their bodies, clothes, or beds, we escaped infection. When I looked at a patient's tongue, I used to hold before my mouth and nose a pocket-handkerchief moistened with vinegar[33].