ly flashed round, and vanished,
trampling and jingling, into the dark jaws of the guardhouse-gate, while
the stream, its temporary barrier removed, rushed on wilder than ever.

Philammon hurried on too with them, not without a strange feeling of
disappointment. 'Only a riot!' Peter was chuckling to his brothers
over their cleverness in 'having kept the prisoners in the middle, and
stopped the rascals' mouths till they were past the guard-house.' 'A
fine thing to boast of,' thought Philammon, 'in the face of the men who
make and unmake kings and Caesars!' 'Only a riot!' He, and the corps of
district visitors--whom he fancied the most august body on earth--and
Alexander's church, Christians murdered by Jews, persecution of the
Catholic faith, and all the rest of it, was simply, then, not worth the
notice of those forty men, alone and secure in the sense of power and
discipline, among tens of thousands .... He hated them, those soldiers.
Was it because they were indifferent to the cause of which he was
inclined to think himself a not unimportant member, on the strength of
his late Samsonic defeat of Jewish persecutors? At least, he obeyed the
little porter's advice, and 'felt very small indeed.'

And he felt smaller still, being young and alive to ridicule, when,
at some sudden ebb or flow, wave or wavelet of the Babel sea, which
weltered up and down every street, a shrill female voice informed them
from an upper window, that Alexander's church was not on fire at all;
that she had gone to the top of the house, as they might have gone, if
they had not been fools, etc. etc.; and that it 'looked as safe and
as ugly as ever'; wherewith a brickbat or two having been sent up in
answer, she shut the blinds, leaving them to halt, inquire, discover
gradually and piecemeal, after the method of mobs, they had been
following the nature of mobs; that no one had seen the church on fire,
or seen any one else who had seen the same, or even seen any light in
the sky in any quarter, or knew who raised the cry; or--or--in short,
Alexander's church was two miles off; if it was on fire, it was either
burnt down or saved by this time; if not, the night-air was, to say
the least, chilly: and, whether it was or not, there were ambuscades
of Jews--Satan only knew how strong--in every street between them and
it.... Might it not be better to secure their two prisoners, and then
ask for further orders from the archbishop? Wherewith, after the manner