shrieks, however, of sufferers in agony, or of maniacs driven mad by disease, broke on the awful quietude. People might be heard crying out of the windows for some to help them in their anguish--to assuage the burning fever, or to carry their dead away. Occasionally, some rushed towards the Thames, with bitter cries, to seek relief from their torments by suicide. The Rev. Thomas Vincent, who was residing in London at the time, describes some touching examples of sorrow, which were only specimens of what prevailed to an indescribable extent. "Amongst other sad spectacles," he says, "two, methought, were very affecting; one of a woman coming alone, and weeping by the door where I lived, (which was in the midst of the infection,) with _a little coffin under her arm_, carrying it to the new churchyard. I did judge that it was the mother of the child, and that all the family besides were dead, and that she was forced to coffin up and to bury with her own hands this her last dead child!" The second case to which this writer alludes is even more terrible than that now given, but out of regard to our readers' feelings we refrain from quoting it. A passenger, the same eye-witness adds, could hardly go out without meeting coffins; and Defoe gives us a picture, as graphic as it is awful, of the mode of sepulture adopted when the plague was at its height. He informs us that a great pit was dug in the churchyard of Aldgate parish, from fifteen to sixteen feet broad, and twenty feet deep; at night, the victims carried off in the day by death were brought in carts by torchlight to this receptacle, the bellman accompanying them, and calling on the inhabitants as they passed along to bring out their dead. Sixteen or seventeen bodies, naked, or wrapped in sheets or rags, were thrown into one cart, and then huddled together into the common grave.