and reader, sitting lonely in his small dining-room,
in Jewen Street. It is now the year 1665; is not the pestilence in
London? A sinful and godless city, with its bloated bishops fawning
around the Nell Gwyns of a licentious and profane Defender of the Faith;
its swaggering and drunken cavaliers; its ribald jesters; its obscene
ballad-singers; its loathsome prisons, crowded with Godfearing men and
women: is not the measure of its iniquity already filled up? Three years
only have passed since the terrible prayer of Vane went upward from the
scaffold on Tower Hill: "When my blood is shed upon the block, let it, O
God, have a voice afterward!" Audible to thy ear, O bosom friend of the
martyr! has that blood cried from earth; and now, how fearfully is it
answered! Like the ashes which the Seer of the Hebrews cast towards
Heaven, it has returned in boils and blains upon the proud and oppressive
city. John Milton, sitting blind in Jewen Street, has heard the toll of
the death-bells, and the nightlong rumble of the burial-carts, and the
terrible summons, "Bring out your dead!" The Angel of the Plague, in
yellow mantle, purple-spotted, walks the streets. Why should he tarry in
a doomed city, forsaken of God! Is not the command, even to him, "Arise
and flee, for thy life"? In some green nook of the quiet country, he may
finish the great work which his hands have found to do. He bethinks him
of his old friends, the Penningtons, and his young Quaker companion, the
patient and gentle Ellwood. "Wherefore," says the latter, "some little
time before I went to Aylesbury jail, I was desired by my quondam Master
Milton to take an house for him in the neighborhood where I dwelt, that
he might go out of the city for the safety of himself and his family, the
pestilence then growing hot in London. I took a pretty box for him in
Giles Chalfont, a mile from me, of which I gave him notice, and intended
to have waited on him and seen him well settled, but was prevented by
that imprisonment. But now being released and returned home, I soon made
a visit to him, to welcome him into the country. After some common
discourse had passed between us, he called for a manuscript of his,
which, having brought, he delivered to me, bidding me take it home with
me and read it at my leisure, and when I had so done return it to him,
with my judgment thereupon."

Now, what does the reader think young Ellwood carried in his gray coat
pocket across t