er
conscience (they had both been foremost in throwing down the canary
birds for roasting alive), took his seat on the parapet of the house,
and harangued the crowd from a pamphlet circulated by the Association,
relative to the true principles of Christianity! Meanwhile the Lord
Mayor, with his hands in his pockets, looked on as an idle man might
look at any other show, and seemed mightily satisfied to have got a good
place.

Such were the accounts brought to the old vintner by his servants as he
sat at the side of Mr Haredale's bed, having been unable even to doze,
after the first part of the night; too much disturbed by his own fears;
by the cries of the mob, the light of the fires, and the firing of the
soldiers. Such, with the addition of the release of all the prisoners in
the New Jail at Clerkenwell, and as many robberies of passengers in
the streets, as the crowd had leisure to indulge in, were the scenes of
which Mr Haredale was happily unconscious, and which were all enacted
before midnight.

Chapter 67

When darkness broke away and morning began to dawn, the town wore a
strange aspect indeed.

Sleep had hardly been thought of all night. The general alarm was so
apparent in the faces of the inhabitants, and its expression was so
aggravated by want of rest (few persons, with any property to lose,
having dared go to bed since Monday), that a stranger coming into the
streets would have supposed some mortal pest or plague to have been
raging. In place of the usual cheerfulness and animation of morning,
everything was dead and silent. The shops remained closed, offices and
warehouses were shut, the coach and chair stands were deserted, no carts
or waggons rumbled through the slowly waking streets, the early cries
were all hushed; a universal gloom prevailed. Great numbers of people
were out, even at daybreak, but they flitted to and fro as though they
shrank from the sound of their own footsteps; the public ways were
haunted rather than frequented; and round the smoking ruins people stood
apart from one another and in silence, not venturing to condemn the
rioters, or to be supposed to do so, even in whispers.

At the Lord President's in Piccadilly, at Lambeth Palace, at the Lord
Chancellor's in Great Ormond Street, in the Royal Exchange, the Bank,
the Guildhall, the Inns of Court, the Courts of Law, and every chamber
fronting the streets near Westminster Hall and the Houses of Parliament,
parties of sol