the sword as plain as
can be." Another saw the angel; one saw his very face, and cried out
what a glorious creature he was. One saw one thing, and one another. I
looked as earnestly as the rest, but perhaps not with so much
willingness to be imposed upon; and I said, indeed, that I could see
nothing but a white cloud, bright on one side, by the shining of the sun
upon the other part. The woman endeavored to show it me, but could not
make me confess that I saw it; which, indeed, if I had, I must have
lied. But the woman, turning to me, looked me in the face, and fancied I
laughed, in which her imagination deceived her too, for I really did not
laugh, but was seriously reflecting how the poor people were terrified
by the force of their own imagination. However, she turned to me, called
me profane fellow and a scoffer, told me that it was a time of God's
anger, and dreadful judgments were approaching, and that despisers such
as I should wander and perish.

The people about her seemed disgusted as well as she, and I found there
was no persuading them that I did not laugh at them, and that I should
be rather mobbed by them than be able to undeceive them. So I left them,
and this appearance passed for as real as the blazing star itself.

Another encounter I had in the open day also; and this was in going
through a narrow passage from Petty France[52] into Bishopsgate
churchyard, by a row of almshouses. There are two churchyards to
Bishopsgate Church or Parish. One we go over to pass from the place
called Petty France into Bishopsgate Street, coming out just by the
church door; the other is on the side of the narrow passage where the
almshouses are on the left, and a dwarf wall with a palisade on it on
the right hand, and the city wall on the other side more to the right.

In this narrow passage stands a man looking through the palisades into
the burying place, and as many people as the narrowness of the place
would admit to stop without hindering the passage of others; and he was
talking mighty eagerly to them, and pointing, now to one place, then to
another, and affirming that he saw a ghost walking upon such a
gravestone there. He described the shape, the posture, and the movement
of it so exactly, that it was the greatest amazement to him in the world
that everybody did not see it as well as he. On a sudden he would cry,
"There it is! Now it comes this way!" then, "'Tis turned back!" till at
length he persuaded the peopl