and as it is told by other authorities with some slight variation, we may accept it, I think, as authentic.

"The fellow was not blind," says Defoe (as he is sometimes said to have been), "but an ignorant, weak, poor man, and usually walked his rounds about ten o'clock at night, and went piping along from door to door, and the people usually took him in at the public-houses where they knew him, and would give him drink and victuals, and sometimes farthings; and he, in return, would pipe and sing and talk simply, which diverted the people, and thus he lived. During the Plague the poor piper went about as usual, but was almost starved; and when anybody asked how he did, he would answer, 'the dead-cart had not taken him yet, but had promised to call for him next week!' happened one night that this poor fellow, having been feasted more bountifully than common, fell fast asleep, and was laid all along upon the top of a bulk or stall, in the street near London Wall, towards Cripplegate, and that upon the same bulk or stall the people of some house hearing a bell, which they always rung before the cart came, had laid a body, really dead of the Plague, just by him, thinking, too, that this poor fellow had been a dead body as the other was, and laid there by some of the neighbours.

It

"Accordingly, when John Hayward, with his bell and the cart, came along, finding two dead bodies lie upon the stall, they took them up with the instruments they used, and threw them into the cart, and all this while the piper slept soundly. From hence they passed along, and took in other dead bodies, till, as honest John Hayward told me, they almost buried him alive in the cart, yet all this while he slept soundly. At length the cart came to the place where the bodies were to be thrown into the ground, which, as

I do remember, was at Mount Mill, and as the cart usually stopped some time before they were ready to shoot out the melancholy load they had in it, as soon as the cart stopped the fellow awakened, and struggled a little to get his head out from among the dead bodies, when raising himself up in the cart, he called out 'Hey! where am I?' This frightened the fellow that attended about the work; but, after some pause, John Hayward, recovering himself, said, 'Lord, bless us! there's somebody in the cart not quite dead.' So another called to him and said, ' Who are you?' The fellow answered, 'I am the poor piper. Where am I?' 'Where are you?' says Hayward; 'why you are in the dead-cart, and we are a-going to bury you.'

But I an't dead, though, am I?' says the piper, which made them laugh a little, though, as John said, they were heartily frightened at first; so they helped the poor fellow down, and he went about his business."

According to another version of the story, the piper, on coming to himself, "set up his pipes," and so terrified the buriers that they all ran away.

As the cold weather approached, the epidemic rapidly decreased. Public confidence revived, shops were opened. The town filled again; and the king and queen returned. By the end of April 1666 the Plague was virtually extinct, after having carried off upwards of a hundred thousand victims.

The Story of the Great Hire.

WHOEVER has climbed the three hundred and forty-five steps of black marble which lead to its summit, and there, from the railed-in balcony or gallery, enjoyed the wonderful prospect it commands of our imperial city, will not readily forget the Monument,-the lofty and shapely column erected by the citizens of London "in perpetual remembrance of the Great Fire of 1666. It is not, perhaps, a beautiful view; one can hardly find much attractiveness in a congeries of house-tops, though the lines of many of the church spires and steeples (chiefly Sir Christopher Wren's) which soar above them are full of grace, and the swelling dome of St. Paul's is always an enchantment. It is scarcely sublime or magnificent; but the mass of buildings so densely packed, and lying half-obscured in a sea of vapour, is, as I have said, wonderful. Looking eastward, our gaze rests, in the first place, on the grey keep of the Tower and the cloud of historic memories that seems to hover above it; then we observe the Mint, the Custom House, and the throng of masts in the river. Immediately in front of us rises the graceful spire of St. Dunstan-in-the-East; and beyond are more masts, and far away the green range of the low Kentish hills. Turning more to the south, our eyes run over the chimneys innumerable of Southwark and the lofty warehouses which line Bankside, recently lifted

into the region of romance by Mr. Walter Besant, and at all times dear to us from its associations with Shakespeare and the great Elizabethans; while the lofty tower of St. Mary Overies forms a landmark not to be easily overlooked. Still pursuing our survey, we range up the misty Thames to the magnificent pile of Westminster's ancient Abbey, which holds so much honoured dust; we watch the progress of barge and steamer and wherry up and down the stream; and we linger at the numerous bridges that connect the two vast sections of the world's metropolis. To the westward the great feature is, of course, St. Paul's, with its gracefully proportioned structure, surmounted by cupola and cross, rising apparently to an almost dizzy elevation, and finding a broad-spread foundation in the aggregate of houses crowded round it. On railway terminus and monster hotel and the terraced embankment we cannot tarry; but complete our examination with a rapid glance over roofs and towers and spires to the northward, where the view is bounded by the rising grounds beyond Hampstead and Highgate, and in the north-east by the green breadths of Epping Forest.

The Monument, as every schoolboy knows,-to use a classic phrase, justified in this instance by its veracity,—was the work of Sir Christopher Wren, and is a memorial of the Great Fire. It stands on the east side of New Fish Street Hill, on the site of St. Margaret's Church, which had perished in the conflagration. As it now stands, it does not reproduce Wren's original design, which, if carried out would have given us a column somewhat inferior in diameter, but more appropriate to its purpose. For, as the Romans expressed in relievo on the pedestals and round the shafts of their columns the history of such accidents and

incidents as were intended to be thereby commemorated, so this monument of the conflagration and restoration of the City of London was represented by a pillar in flames; the flames blazing from the loopholes of the shaft (which were to give light to the stairs within) being figured in brass-work gilt; and on the top there was a Phoenix rising from her ashes, in brass gilt likewise." Even in Wren's second design—the present pillar-an alteration was made by the authorities. Wren had intended to place on its summit a colossal statue, in brass gilt, of the King, as founder of the new city; or else the erect figure of a woman crowned with laurels, and holding a sword and cap of maintenance, as symbolical of the wealth and greatness of restored London. But Wren's employers took the flames from the sides of his column, and placed them on its top, in a kind of glorified bunch.

The Monument was erected between 1676 and 1677, at an expense of about £14,500, and forms an elegant fluted column of stone, of the Doric order. Its height from the pavement, including the flaming crest, is 202 feet; * the pedestal is 40 feet high and 21 feet square; the plinth, 27 feet square. The greatest diameter of the interior shaft is 15 feet.

On the completion of the Monument, Cibber, the sculptor of the two powerful allegorical figures on the gates of old Bedlam, was called in to adorn the west or front of the pedestal with appropriate sculpture; but in this he was not successful. The design is confused; Charles II. figures in it, and there are three females, representing Liberty, Genius, and Science, and labourers and implements of

* The exact distance, it is said, from the house where the Fire first broke out.