Of course, so soon as foreign nations heard of the plague they sent no more ships to England, and instead of being covered with vessels from all lands, the Thames was deserted and silent. Worse than that, numbers of people threw the dead bodies of their friends who had died into the water, and these floated down with the tide, or, catching in some pier or beside some boat, hung there until the air was filled with the dreadful smell of the rotting bodies. Cats and dogs were drowned, too, for fear that they should carry the infection, and their dead bodies made the river loathsome. Everywhere there were awful sights and sounds and smells; not even by the water could anyone escape. When the hot weather came in summer the plague grew worse; in one week four thousand persons died of it. Four thousand! It is difficult to imagine. But this was not the worst: the deaths went on until London was a city of the dead, and the living were very few. Fathers had lost children, husbands wives, children parents; there was no household that had not suffered from the plague. A preacher who used to go about the streets dressed only in a rough garment of fur like John the Baptist had prophesied that the grass should grow in the streets, and that the living should not be able to bury the dead. It was long since the first part of this had been true, and now the second became true, too. The people who were left were not enough to bury those who died, and even in the streets the bodies lay unburied. St. Paul's itself was used as a pest-house--that is to say, as a hospital for the plague-stricken. We can imagine that the people who were left alive felt as if they were living in some nightmare dream from which they could not awake. They must have lost all hope of ever seeing London restored to itself, and the streets clean and bright once more. It was not until the summer was past and the cold weather began that the deaths were fewer, and when the number was only one thousand a week everyone began to get hopeful again. People who had fled into the country began to come back, a few shopkeepers opened their shops, the country people came timidly to bring vegetables for sale, and so gradually things got a little better. The houses were cleaned and whitewashed, the streets were cleansed, and large fires were lit to burn up any rubbish that might still hold infection. St. Paul's Cathedral was cleaned out, and the beds that the patients had used were burned, and all seemed better.