s had not
taken the trouble to cover from view. A bystander said that these
were men who had run back into the building to drink the flaming
spirit, and had dropped insensible, and been crushed when the walls
fell in. The boy had never seen death before; and at the sight of it
thrust upon him in this brutal form, he put out a hand towards his
mother to find that she too was swaying.

"Hallo!" cried the same bystander, "look out there! the lady's
fainting."

But Mrs. Wesley steadied herself. "'Tis not _that_," she gasped,
at the same time waving him off; "'tis the fire--the fire!"
And stepping by the crossing she fled along the street with Charles
at her heels, nor ceased running for another hundred yards.
"You do not remember," she began, turning at length; "no, of course
you do not. You were a babe, not two years old; nurse snatched you
out of bed--"

The odd thing was that, despite the impossibility, Charles seemed to
remember quite clearly. As a child he had heard his sisters talk so
often of the fire at Epworth Rectory that the very scene--and
especially Jacky's escape--was bitten on the blank early pages as a
real memory. He had half a mind now to question his mother about it
and startle her with details, but her face forbade him.

She recovered her colour in bargaining with a waterman at Blackwall
Stairs. Two stately Indiamen lay out on the river below, almost
flank by flank; and, as it happened, the farther one was at that
moment weighing her anchor, indeed had it tripped on the cathead.
A cloud of boats hung about her, trailing astern as her head-sails
drew and she began to gather way on the falling tide.

The waterman, a weedy loafer with a bottle nose and watery blue eyes,
agreed to pull across for threepence; but no sooner were they
embarked and on the tide-way, than he lay on his oars and jerked his
thumb towards the moving ship. "Make it a crown, ma'am, and I'll
overhaul her," he hiccupped.

Mrs. Wesley glanced towards the two ships and counted down threepence
deliberately upon the thwart facing her, at the same time pursing up
her lips to hide a smile. For the one ship lay moored stem and stern
with her bows pointed up the river, and the other, drifting past, at
this moment swung her tall poop into view with her windows flashing
against the afternoon sun, and beneath them her name, the _Josiah
Childs_, in tall gilt letters.

"Better make it a crown, ma'am," the waterman repeated with a d