ld be alive, the streets filled with
passersby, wagons lumbering along with heavy freights, fine folks
in their coaches or on horseback picking their way from place to
place, and shopmen or their apprentices crying their wares from
open doorways.

Now the streets were almost empty. The shops were almost all shut
up. Here and there an open bake house was to be seen, orders having
been issued that these places were to remain available for the
public, come what might; and women or trembling servant maids were
to be seen going to and fro with their loads of bread or dough for
baking.

But each person looked askance at the other. Neighbours were afraid
to pause to exchange greetings, and hurried away from all contact
with one another; and children breaking away from their mothers'
sides were speedily called back, and chidden for their temerity.

Some of the churches stood wide open, and persons were seen to
hurry in, lock themselves for a few minutes into separate pews, and
pour out their souls in supplication. Often the sound of
lamentation and weeping was heard to issue from these buildings. At
certain hours of the day such of the clergy as were not scared away
through fear of infection, or who were not otherwise occupied
amongst the sick, would come in and address the persons gathered
there, or read the daily office of prayer; but although at first
these services had been well attended--people flocking to the
churches as though to take sanctuary there--the widely-increased
mortality and the fearful spread of the distemper had caused a
panic throughout the city. The magistrates had issued warnings
against the assembling of persons together in the same building,
and the congregations were themselves so wasted and decimated by
death and disease that each week saw fewer and fewer able to
attend.

From every steeple in the city the bells tolled ceaselessly for the
dead. But it was already whispered that soon they would toll no
more, for the deaths were becoming past all count, and there might
likely enough be soon no one left to toll.

At one open place through which Dinah led her companions, a tall
man, strangely habited, and with a great mass of untrimmed hair and
beard, was addressing a wild harangue to a ring of breathless
listeners. In vivid and graphic words he was summing up the
wickedness and perversity of the city, and telling how that the
wrath of God had descended upon it, and that He would no longer
stay H