Upon her return a fresh difficulty presented itself. The neighbourhood of Aldersgate Street was represented to him as being more dreadfully visited by the pestilence than any other quarter, and few even of the common people cared to expose themselves to the jeopardy of approaching it. A handsome reward, which completely exhausted his attenuated purse, at last induced a sailor to procure a barrow, and offer to wheel home his effects; but so much time had been lost in this negociation, that the evening was already closing in when they started.

The public fires which had been ordered to be lighted in different quarters of the city, under the notion of their purifying the atmosphere, now cast a ghastly glare upon the sickly wretches that occasionally gathered about them. The rakers were going their rounds, blowing a horn, to give notice to the inhabitants that they should bring out the sweepings and filth of their houses, which these men were appointed to collect every evening, lest new

infection should be generated: and as the darkness increased he began to encounter a still more révolting spectacle, -the carts that went the nightly round of every parish, the driver sounding a large bell, and his comrades, in the intervals of its noise, uttering the doleful cry of " Bring out your dead! bring out your dead!" The continual stoppages of the vehicle, the sickening sight of the corpses, brought down in the habiliments in which the parties had died, and tossed promiscuously in, one upon another, by wretches whom custom had rendered callous, the general wailings, lamentations, and shrieks of the surviving relatives, as the bell again sounded and the cart drove off, would have been sufficiently harrowing to his feelings, without the examples of individual agony from which he was unable at times to withdraw his eyes, although they were almost withered at the sight.

In one place a mother, wildly following the cart that contained her only son, disregarded all the solicitations and even menaces of the drivers

and with distracted cries ordered them to give her back her child; in another, a man had rushed from his bed half naked, and run into the streets in a state of delirium, dancing and singing, and making a thousand antic gestures, followed by his distressed family weeping and calling upon him for the Lord's sake to come back, and beseeching the assistance of others to compel him; but all in vain, nobody daring to approach, still less to lay hands upon him, for fear of infection. In passing Aldgate church-yard he was attracted by the sight of numerous links; and an impulse of momentary curiosity inducing him to gaze through the iron railings, he beheld several buriers surrounding a huge pit, into which two of the dead-carts were at that moment emptying their contents. In following one of these vehicles he had observed a man walking behind it, wrapped up in a cloak, and apparently a prey to intense though silent grief: and from the conversation of the drivers, he had gathered, that this unfortunate being, having al

ready buried his wife, was now following three children, being the whole of his family, to the grave. As the cart entered the church-yard he had for a moment disappeared; but as the bodies of his children were shot into the pit, he suddenly rushed forward, and with a dreadful cry threw himself into the midst of the yawning and pestiferous abyss.

Jocelyn could gaze no more, his senses were bewildered; and when he was at last enabled to continue his progress, he determined to cast his eyes as little as possible either to the right or the left, lest they should be scared by some new object of horror. In great consternation and sickness of soul, he at last reached his lodginghouse in Aldersgate Street, discharged his porter, carried his effects into his own room, and betook himself immediately to bed, not less fatigued in. body, than saddened and subdued in spirit.

The shock that his feelings had received, and a deep sense of his individual danger, induced him to form two immediate resolutions to cɔn

fine himself to the house while he remained in London—and to quit it with all speed for Oxford, where he had now ascertained that the Court were stationed. The latter object could not be accomplished without money, of which he had not a shilling left; and he was therefore reduced to the necessity, though not without some feeling of humiliation, of stating his situation to his landlady, and requesting her to advance him what he wanted upon the security of his diamond-hilted sword. This proposition the generous

woman instantly rejected; it was enough that he was the friend of Alderman Staunton, her benefactor; his receipt was all that she required: and this being given, she delivered to him in gold a sum much more than adequate to the expenses of his contemplated journey. With a friendly solicitude for his safety, she most earnestly dissuaded him from trusting himself to any mode of conveyance that might expose him to the company of other people; adding that she daily, almost hourly,