nd: was here, and there, and everywhere--always
foremost--always active--striking at the soldiers, cheering on the
crowd, making his horse's iron music heard through all the yell and
uproar: but never hurt or stopped. Turn him at one place, and he made
a new struggle in another; force him to retreat at this point, and he
advanced on that, directly. Driven from Holborn for the twentieth
time, he rode at the head of a great crowd straight upon Saint Paul's,
attacked a guard of soldiers who kept watch over a body of prisoners
within the iron railings, forced them to retreat, rescued the men they
had in custody, and with this accession to his party, came back again,
mad with liquor and excitement, and hallooing them on like a demon.

It would have been no easy task for the most careful rider to sit a
horse in the midst of such a throng and tumult; but though this madman
rolled upon his back (he had no saddle) like a boat upon the sea, he
never for an instant lost his seat, or failed to guide him where he
would. Through the very thickest of the press, over dead bodies and
burning fragments, now on the pavement, now in the road, now riding up
a flight of steps to make himself the more conspicuous to his party,
and now forcing a passage through a mass of human beings, so closely
squeezed together that it seemed as if the edge of a knife would
scarcely part them,--on he went, as though he could surmount all
obstacles by the mere exercise of his will. And perhaps his not being
shot was in some degree attributable to this very circumstance; for his
extreme audacity, and the conviction that he must be one of those to
whom the proclamation referred, inspired the soldiers with a desire to
take him alive, and diverted many an aim which otherwise might have been
more near the mark.

The vintner and Mr Haredale, unable to sit quietly listening to the
noise without seeing what went on, had climbed to the roof of the house,
and hiding behind a stack of chimneys, were looking cautiously down into
the street, almost hoping that after so many repulses the rioters would
be foiled, when a great shout proclaimed that a parry were coming round
the other way; and the dismal jingling of those accursed fetters warned
them next moment that they too were led by Hugh. The soldiers had
advanced into Fleet Market and were dispersing the people there; so that
they came on with hardly any check, and were soon before the house.

'All's over now,' said t