The malady in London began to decline in the latter part of September, and at the end of the year it ceased, when the City soon filled again, resuming its wonted aspect of activity and bustle, and the beneficed clergy who had fled reappeared in their pulpits. The minister of St. Olave's, where Pepys attended, was the first to leave, the last to return; and the minute chronicler informs us, that when he went with his wife to church, to hear this Divine preach to his long-neglected flock, he "made but a very poor and short excuse, and a bad sermon."[473] The Plague, when it left London, visited, with its horrors, many other parts of England. It is curious to find that the Corporation of Norwich gave orders to the parish clerks, not to toll for the dead, any bell, but one belonging to the parish in which the person died; because it had become a practice for the citizens in one parish to have the bells tolled for deceased friends in another parish, so that all the church steeples were sometimes ringing out a knell for the same individual. [Sidenote: THE PLAGUE.] As in London, so in the country, the ejected clergy[474] watched for opportunities of usefulness, but they were often thwarted in their laudable efforts. Owen Stockton, ejected at Colchester, when he saw many, "even the shepherds of the flock, hastening their flight," offered, if the magistrates "would indulge him the liberty of a public church, to stay and preach,"--"till either God should take him away by death, or cause the pestilence to cease." The magistrates had no power to set aside the law, and the privilege asked being denied, the Puritan confessor, from the study of the words in the Book of Isaiah--"Hide thyself as it were for a little moment until the indignation be overpast"--satisfied himself as to the lawfulness of removing from place to place, in time of peril, and hastened with his family to the retired village of Chattisham, in Suffolk.[475]