On the third of the month the people had been startled in the City by the distant boom of guns, which had endured throughout the day to intimate that the Dutch and English fleets were engaged and rather alarmingly close at hand. The engagement, as you know, was somewhere off the coast in the neighbourhood of Harwich, and it ended in heavy loss to the Dutch, who drew off back to the Texel. There were, of course, the usual exaggerations on both sides, and both English and Dutch claimed a complete victory and lighted bonfires. Our affair, however, is not with what was happening in Holland. In London from the 8th June, when first the news came of the complete rout of the Dutch and the destruction of half their ships, until the 20th, which was appointed as a thanksgiving day for that great victory, there were high junketings over the business, junketings which reached their climax at Whitehall on the 16th to welcome back the victorious Duke of York, returning from sea--as Mr. Pepys tells us--all fat and lusty and ruddy from being in the sun. And well it was--or perhaps not--that there should have been such excitements to keep the mind of the people diverted from the thing happening in their midst, to blind them to the spread of the plague, which, if slow, was nevertheless relentlessly steady, a foe likely to prove less easily engaged and beaten than the Dutch. After the wild public rejoicings of the 20th, people seemed suddenly to awaken to their peril. It may be that the sense of danger and dismay had its source in Whitehall, which was emptying itself rapidly now. The Court removed itself to the more salubrious air of Salisbury, and throughout the day on the 21st and again on the 22d there was a constant westward stream of coaches and wagons by Charing Cross, laden with people departing from the infected town to seek safety in the country. That flight struck dismay into the City, whose inhabitants felt themselves in the position of mariners abandoned aboard a ship that is doomed. Something approaching panic ensued as a consequence of the orders promulgated by the Lord Mayor and the measures taken to combat the dread disease. Sir John Lawrence had been constrained to issue stringent regulations, to appoint examiners and searchers, and to take measures for shutting up and isolating infected houses--measures so rigorous that they finally dispelled any remains of the fond illusion that there was immunity within the walls of the City itself.