's
clear; get back by different ways; and meet as usual!' With that, he
disappeared again,--contrary to his wont, for he was always first to
advance, and last to go away,--leaving them to follow homewards as they
would.

It was not an easy task to draw off such a throng. If Bedlam gates had
been flung wide open, there would not have issued forth such maniacs as
the frenzy of that night had made. There were men there, who danced and
trampled on the beds of flowers as though they trod down human enemies,
and wrenched them from the stalks, like savages who twisted human necks.
There were men who cast their lighted torches in the air, and suffered
them to fall upon their heads and faces, blistering the skin with deep
unseemly burns. There were men who rushed up to the fire, and paddled
in it with their hands as if in water; and others who were restrained by
force from plunging in, to gratify their deadly longing. On the skull of
one drunken lad--not twenty, by his looks--who lay upon the ground with
a bottle to his mouth, the lead from the roof came streaming down in a
shower of liquid fire, white hot; melting his head like wax. When the
scattered parties were collected, men--living yet, but singed as with
hot irons--were plucked out of the cellars, and carried off upon the
shoulders of others, who strove to wake them as they went along, with
ribald jokes, and left them, dead, in the passages of hospitals. But of
all the howling throng not one learnt mercy from, or sickened at, these
sights; nor was the fierce, besotted, senseless rage of one man glutted.

Slowly, and in small clusters, with hoarse hurrahs and repetitions
of their usual cry, the assembly dropped away. The last few red-eyed
stragglers reeled after those who had gone before; the distant noise of
men calling to each other, and whistling for others whom they missed,
grew fainter and fainter; at length even these sounds died away, and
silence reigned alone.

Silence indeed! The glare of the flames had sunk into a fitful, flashing
light; and the gentle stars, invisible till now, looked down upon the
blackening heap. A dull smoke hung upon the ruin, as though to hide it
from those eyes of Heaven; and the wind forbore to move it. Bare walls,
roof open to the sky--chambers, where the beloved dead had, many and
many a fair day, risen to new life and energy; where so many dear ones
had been sad and merry; which were connected with so many thoughts and
hopes, regret