y morning;
some had been seen by their employers active in the tumult; others
knew they must be suspected, and that they would be discharged if they
returned; others had been desperate from the beginning, and comforted
themselves with the homely proverb, that, being hanged at all, they
might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb. They all hoped and
believed, in a greater or less degree, that the government they seemed
to have paralysed, would, in its terror, come to terms with them in the
end, and suffer them to make their own conditions. The least sanguine
among them reasoned with himself that, at the worst, they were too many
to be all punished, and that he had as good a chance of escape as any
other man. The great mass never reasoned or thought at all, but were
stimulated by their own headlong passions, by poverty, by ignorance, by
the love of mischief, and the hope of plunder.

One other circumstance is worthy of remark; and that is, that from the
moment of their first outbreak at Westminster, every symptom of order
or preconcerted arrangement among them vanished. When they divided
into parties and ran to different quarters of the town, it was on the
spontaneous suggestion of the moment. Each party swelled as it went
along, like rivers as they roll towards the sea; new leaders sprang
up as they were wanted, disappeared when the necessity was over, and
reappeared at the next crisis. Each tumult took shape and form from the
circumstances of the moment; sober workmen, going home from their day's
labour, were seen to cast down their baskets of tools and become rioters
in an instant; mere boys on errands did the like. In a word, a moral
plague ran through the city. The noise, and hurry, and excitement, had
for hundreds and hundreds an attraction they had no firmness to resist.
The contagion spread like a dread fever: an infectious madness, as yet
not near its height, seized on new victims every hour, and society began
to tremble at their ravings.

It was between two and three o'clock in the afternoon when Gashford
looked into the lair described in the last chapter, and seeing only
Barnaby and Dennis there, inquired for Hugh.

He was out, Barnaby told him; had gone out more than an hour ago; and
had not yet returned.

'Dennis!' said the smiling secretary, in his smoothest voice, as he sat
down cross-legged on a barrel, 'Dennis!'

The hangman struggled into a sitting posture directly, and with his eyes
wide open, l