The possibility of a change would just present itself--the wish, perhaps not yet. And among the labouring classes, too, the diminished number of hands at work in every calling soon gave the remainder high rates of wages, which they spent in idleness and excess. The mere passage of wealth into fresh hands, always unthrifty, created an immense demand out of the very general mourning and distress for articles of cost and luxury. All who had been rich, had not drank choice wines, or maintained brilliant equipages. All who rose from poverty did so--often to the most prodigal dissipation of their means--on the instant. Until even the very same calamity which in a few months made the city absolutely a desert, in its outset actually gave a new and increased impulse to its pleasurable and commercial movements! In the mean time, however, the shroud-maker plied his needle almost as rapidly as the maker of new robes; and, as the fury of the pestilence increased, all this jollity, which at first had some show of the mirth of madness about it, ran on till, like the merriment produced by wine in company, by degrees, it broke into bloodshed and misrule. In the beginning of the scourge, the succession to an estate or a title had not carried with it--as of course--a notice that the inheritor was only tenant for an hour. But when the deaths had risen to more than a hundred a-day in the city, and when the man who became heir to an estate in one twenty-four hours left it to somebody else--or perhaps left it without a claimant--in the next, this general state of insecurity, added to the extraordinary description of hands into which property passed, seemed first to repeal all sanity and principle; and soon led to the wildest and most unheard-of outrages.