Many houses were then left desolate, all the people being carried away dead; and especially in an alley farther on the same side beyond the bars, going in at the sign of Moses and Aaron.[245] There were several houses together, which they said had not one person left alive in them; and some that died last in several of those houses were left a little too long before they were fetched out to be buried, the reason of which was not, as some have written very untruly, that the living were not sufficient to bury the dead, but that the mortality was so great in the yard or alley that there was nobody left to give notice to the buriers or sextons that there were any dead bodies there to be buried. It was said, how true I know not, that some of those bodies were so corrupted and so rotten, that it was with difficulty they were carried; and, as the carts could not come any nearer than to the alley gate in the High Street, it was so much the more difficult to bring them along. But I am not certain how many bodies were then left: I am sure that ordinarily it was not so. As I have mentioned how the people were brought into a condition to despair of life, and abandoned themselves, so this very thing had a strange effect among us for three or four weeks; that is, it made them bold and venturous. They were no more shy of one another, or restrained within doors, but went anywhere and everywhere, and began to converse. One would say to another, "I do not ask you how you are, or say how I am. It is certain we shall all go: so 'tis no matter who is sick or who is sound." And so they ran desperately into any place or company.