e
were burning; the dust, and smoke, and drift of fiery particles,
scorching and kindling all it fell upon; the hot unwholesome vapour,
the blight on everything; the stars, and moon, and very sky,
obliterated;--made up such a sum of dreariness and ruin, that it seemed
as if the face of Heaven were blotted out, and night, in its rest and
quiet, and softened light, never could look upon the earth again.

But there was a worse spectacle than this--worse by far than fire and
smoke, or even the rabble's unappeasable and maniac rage. The gutters
of the street, and every crack and fissure in the stones, ran with
scorching spirit, which being dammed up by busy hands, overflowed
the road and pavement, and formed a great pool, into which the people
dropped down dead by dozens. They lay in heaps all round this fearful
pond, husbands and wives, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, women
with children in their arms and babies at their breasts, and drank until
they died. While some stooped with their lips to the brink and never
raised their heads again, others sprang up from their fiery draught,
and danced, half in a mad triumph, and half in the agony of suffocation,
until they fell, and steeped their corpses in the liquor that had killed
them. Nor was even this the worst or most appalling kind of death that
happened on this fatal night. From the burning cellars, where they
drank out of hats, pails, buckets, tubs, and shoes, some men were drawn,
alive, but all alight from head to foot; who, in their unendurable
anguish and suffering, making for anything that had the look of water,
rolled, hissing, in this hideous lake, and splashed up liquid fire
which lapped in all it met with as it ran along the surface, and
neither spared the living nor the dead. On this last night of the great
riots--for the last night it was--the wretched victims of a senseless
outcry, became themselves the dust and ashes of the flames they had
kindled, and strewed the public streets of London.

With all he saw in this last glance fixed indelibly upon his mind,
Barnaby hurried from the city which enclosed such horrors; and holding
down his head that he might not even see the glare of the fires upon the
quiet landscape, was soon in the still country roads.

He stopped at about half-a-mile from the shed where his father lay, and
with some difficulty making Hugh sensible that he must dismount, sunk
the horse's furniture in a pool of stagnant water, and turned