readiness;
'Yes, I see it all plainly,' says one; 'there's 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 endeavoured 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 upon me, looked in my face, and fancied I
laughed, in which her imagination deceived her too, for I really did
not laugh, but was very seriously reflecting how the poor people were
terrified by the force of their own imagination. However, she turned
from me, called me profane fellow, and a scoffer; told me that it was a
time of God's anger, and dreadful judgements 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 into Bishopsgate Churchyard,
by a row of alms-houses. 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 alms-houses are on the
left; and a dwarf-wall with a palisado 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 between the
palisadoes into the burying-place, and as many people as the narrowness
of the passage would admit to stop, without hindering the passage of
others, and he was talking mightily 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 matter of
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; n