Counting the costs

In August how dreadful is the increase! ... Now people fall as thick as the leaves in autumn, when they are shaken by a mighty wind.... Now shops are shut in, people rare and very few that walk about, in so much that the grass begins to spring up in some places, and a deep silence almost in every place; ... no prancing horses, no rattling coaches, no calling in customers nor offering wares.... Now in some places, where the people generally did stay, not one house in an hundred but what is infected; and in many houses half the family is swept away; in some the whole from the eldest to the youngest; few escape but with the death of one or two. Never did so many husbands and wives die together; never did so many parents carry their children with them to the grave.