ies applied. About the same time, too, he lost his
porter, Dallison. The poor fellow did not make his appearance as usual
for two days, and intelligence of his fate was brought on the following
day by his wife, who came to state that her husband was dead, and had
been thrown into the plague-pit at Aldgate. The same night, however, she
brought another man, named Allestry, who took the place of the late
porter, and acquainted his employer with the deplorable state of the
city.

Two days afterwards, Allestry himself died, and Mr. Bloundel had no one
to replace him. He thus lost all means of ascertaining what was going
forward; but the deathlike stillness around him, broken only by the
hoarse tolling of a bell, by a wild shriek or other appalling cry,
proclaimed too surely the terrible state of things. Sometimes, too, a
passenger would go by, and would tell him the dreadful height to which
the bills of mortality had risen, assuring him that ere another month
had expired, not a soul would be left alive in London.

One night, as Solomon Eagle, who had likewise been miraculously
preserved, pursued his course through the streets, he paused before Mr.
Roundel's house, and looking up at the window, at which the latter had
chanced to be stationed, cried in a loud voice, "Be of good cheer. You
have served God faithfully, and there shall no evil befall you, neither
shall the plague come nigh your dwelling." And raising his arms, as if
invoking a blessing upon the habitation, he departed.

It was now the second week in September, and as yet Mr. Bloundel had
received no tidings of his daughter. At any other season he would have
been seriously uneasy, but now, as has been already stated, all private
grief was swallowed up in the horror of the general calamity. Satisfied
that she was in a healthful situation, and that her chance of
preservation from the pestilence was better than that of any other
member of his family, he turned his thoughts entirely to them.
Redoubling his precautions, he tried by every means to keep up the
failing spirits of his household, and but rarely ventured to open his
shutter, and look forth on the external world.

On the tenth of September, which was afterwards accounted the most fatal
day of this fatal month, a young man of a very dejected appearance, and
wearing the traces of severe suffering in his countenance, entered the
west end of London, and took his way slowly towards the city. He had
passed Saint