Very soon all the rich people left London and fled away into the country, though, of course, the country people did not want them, for fear that they had brought the infection. But there were hundreds and hundreds of people who stayed in London and even tried to carry on their business. At first they struggled bravely and pretended nothing was the matter, but very soon this was impossible. You could not imagine what London looked like then. No one drove in the streets, no one walked there if he could help it; grass grew up between the cobble-stones, and nearly all the houses had shutters up, showing that their inhabitants had gone away. A nurse would come quickly along holding a little red staff in her hand to show she had been nursing a plague patient, and that other people had better avoid her. Then slowly down the street would come a cart, with a man walking beside the horse, and he would call out: 'Bring out your dead! bring out your dead!' just as if he were shouting to sell coals. And in the cart were the bodies of the people who had died of the plague. It was extraordinary that any man could be found to drive that cart, and he had to have very high wages; and even then he must have been a low sort of man, without any imagination, a man who did not mind much what his work was so long as he had some money to spend in drink. One of these men was sitting on his cart one day when it was noticed that he seemed to be ill, and the next moment he fell off dead, having caught the plague. When people were dying by hundreds and hundreds there was no time to bury them properly: and yet they had to be buried, or the dead bodies would make it impossible for anyone to live at all. So great pits were dug many yards wide, and into these the bodies of men, women, and children were put in rows and rows, one row on the top of another, and the whole covered in with stuff called quicklime. Whenever anyone began with the plague, it was the duty of the head of the household to see that a red cross was marked on his door as a warning to others to keep away, and it must have been very sad to see these long red crosses on so many doors, with the grass-grown street in front of the houses, and the slow plague-cart going down the street.