[Sidenote: PROGRESS OF THE PESTILENCE.] The pestilence which accompanied this terrible visitation broke out in November 1694, when many of the people were seized by “strange fevers, and sore fluxes of a most infectious nature,” which defied the utmost power of medicine. “For the oldest physicians,” says Walker, “had never seen the like before, and could make no help.” In the parish of West Calder, out of nine hundred “examinable persons” three hundred were swept away; and in Livingston, in a little village called the Craigs, inhabited by only six or eight families, there were thirty corpses in the space of a few days. In the parish of Resolis whole villages were depopulated, and the foundations of the houses, for they were never afterwards inhabited, can still be pointed out by old men of the place. So violent were the effects of the disease, that people, who in the evening were in apparent health, would be found lying dead in their houses next morning, “the head resting on the hand, and the face and arms not unfrequently gnawed by the rats.” The living were wearied with burying the dead; bodies were drawn on sledges to the place of interment, and many got neither coffin nor winding-sheet. “I was one of four,” says the Pedlar, “who carried the corpse of a young woman a mile of way; and when we came to the grave, an honest poor man came and said--‘You must go and help me to bury my son; he has lain dead these two days.’ We went, and had two miles to carry the corpse, many neighbours looking on us, but none coming to assist.” “I was credibly informed,” he continues, “that in the north, two sisters, on a Monday morning, were found carrying their brother on a barrow with bearing-ropes, resting themselves many times, and none offering to help them.” There is a tradition that in one of the villages of Resolis the sole survivor was an idiot, whose mother had been, of all its more sane inhabitants, the last victim to the disease. He waited beside the corpse for several days, and then taking it up on his shoulders carried it to a neighbouring village, and left it standing upright beside a garden wall.