attendant malady.

Moreover, the virulence of the pest was the greater by reason that
intercourse was apt to convey it from the sick to the whole, just as fire
devours things dry or greasy when they are brought close to it. Nay, the
evil went yet further, for not merely by speech or association with the sick
was the malady communicated to the healthy with consequent peril of common
death; but any that touched the cloth of the sick or aught else that had
been touched or used by them, seemed thereby to contract the disease.

So marvellous sounds that which I have now to relate, that, had not many,
and I among them, observed it with their own eyes, I had hardly dared to
credit it, much less to set it down in writing, though I had had it from the
lips of a credible witness.

I say, then, that such was the energy of the contagion of the said
pestilence, that it was not merely propagated from man to man but, what is
much more startling, it was frequently observed, that things which had
belonged to one sick or dead of the disease, if touched by some other living
creature, not of the human species, were the occasion, not merely of
sickening, but of an almost instantaneous death. Whereof my own eyes (as I
said a little before) had cognisance, one day among others, by the following
experience. The rags of a poor man who had died of the disease being strewn
about the open street, two hogs came thither, and after, as is their wont,
no little trifling with their snouts, took the rags between their teeth and
tossed them to and fro about their chaps; whereupon, almost immediately,
they gave a few turns, and fell down dead, as if by poison, upon the rags
which in an evil hour they had disturbed.

In which circumstances, not to speak of many others of a similar or even