Sister Ruth, tempt me not with that calf’s
head, it is all streaming with blood;--drop it, I beseech thee, sister,
it is unmeet in a woman’s hand, though the brethren drink of it.--Woe be
unto thee, gainsayer, dost thou not see how flames envelope the accursed
city under his Arminian and Popish son?--London is on fire!--on fire!”
he yelled; “and the brands are lit by the half-papist, whole-arminian,
all-damned people thereof.--Fire!--fire!” The voice in which he shrieked
out the last words was powerfully horrible, but it was like the moan of
an infant, compared to the voice which took up and re-echoed the cry, in
a tone that made the building shake. It was the voice of a maniac, who
had lost her husband, children, subsistence, and finally her reason, in
the dreadful fire of London. The cry of fire never failed to operate
with terrible punctuality on her associations. She had been in a
disturbed sleep, and now started from it as suddenly as on that dreadful
night. It was Saturday night, too, and she was always observed to be
particularly violent on that night,--it was the terrible weekly festival
of insanity with her. She was awake, and busy in a moment escaping from
the flames; and she dramatized the whole scene with such hideous
fidelity, that Stanton’s resolution was far more in danger from her than
from the battle between his neighbours _Testimony_ and _Hothead_. She
began exclaiming she was suffocated by the smoke; then she sprung from
her bed, calling for a light, and appeared to be struck by the sudden
glare that burst through her casement.--“The last day,” she shrieked,
“The last day! The very heavens are on fire!”--“That will not come till
the Man of Sin be first destroyed,” cried the weaver; “thou ravest of
light and fire, and yet thou art in utter darkness.--I pity thee, poor
mad soul, I pity thee!” The maniac never heeded him; she appeared to be
scrambling up a stair-case to her children’s room. She exclaimed she was
scorched, singed, suffocated; her courage appeared to fail, and she
retreated. “But my children are there!” she cried in a voice of
unspeakable agony, as she seemed to make another effort; “here I
am--here I am come to save you.--Oh God! They are all blazing!--Take
this arm--no, not that, it is scorched and disabled--well, any arm--take
hold of my clothes--no, they are blazing too!--Well, take me all on fire
as I am!--And their hair, how it hisses!--Water, one drop of water for
my youngest--he is but an infant--for my youngest, and let me burn!” She
paused in horrid silence, to watch the fall of a blazing rafter that was
about to shatter the stair-case on which she stood.--“The roof has
fallen on my head!” she exclaimed. “The earth is weak, and all the
inhabitants thereof,” chaunted the weaver; “I bear up the pillars of
it.”

The maniac marked the destruction of the spot where she thought
she stood by one desperate bound, accompanied by a wild shriek, and
then calmly gazed on her infants as they rolled over the scorching
fragments, and sunk into the abyss of fire below. “There they
go,--one--two--three--all!” and her voice sunk into low mutterings, and
her convulsions into faint, cold shudderings, like the sobbings of a
spent storm, as she imagined herself to “stand in safety and despair,”
amid the thousand houseless wretches assembled in the suburbs of London
on the dreadful nights after the fire, without food, roof, or raiment,
all gazing on the burning ruins of their dwellings and their property. She seemed to listen to their complaints, and even repeated some of them
very affectingly, but invariably answered them with the same words, “But
I have lost all my children--_all_!” It was remarkable, that when this
sufferer began to rave, all the others became silent. The cry of nature
hushed every other cry,--she was the only patient in the house who was
not mad from politics, religion, ebriety, or some perverted passion; and
terrifying as the out-break of her frenzy always was, Stanton used to
await it as a kind of relief from the dissonant, melancholy, and
ludicrous ravings of the others. But the utmost efforts of his resolution began to sink under the
continued horrors of the place. The impression on his senses began to
defy the power of reason to resist them. He could not shut out these
frightful cries nightly repeated, nor the frightful sound of the whip
employed to still them. Hope began to fail him, as he observed, that the
submissive tranquillity (which he had imagined, by obtaining increased
indulgence, might contribute to his escape, or perhaps convince the
keeper of his sanity) was interpreted by the callous ruffian, who was
acquainted only with the varieties of _madness_, as a more refined
species of that cunning which he was well accustomed to watch and
baffle. On his first discovery of his situation, he had determined to take the
utmost care of his health and intellect that the place allowed, as the
sole basis of his hope of deliverance. But as that hope declined, he
neglected the means of realizing it. He had at first risen early, walked
incessantly about his cell, and availed himself of every opportunity of
being in the open air. He took the strictest care of his person in point
of cleanliness, and with or without appetite, regularly forced down his
miserable meals; and all these efforts were even pleasant, as long as
hope prompted them. But now he began to relax them all. He passed half
the day in his wretched bed, in which he frequently took his meals,
declined shaving or changing his linen, and, when the sun shone into his
cell, turned from it on his straw with a sigh of heart-broken
despondency. Formerly, when the air breathed through his grating, he
used to say, “Blessed air of heaven, I shall breathe you once more in
freedom!--Reserve all your freshness for that delicious evening when I
shall inhale you, and be as free as you myself.” Now when he felt it, he
sighed and said nothing. The twitter of the sparrows, the pattering of
rain, or the moan of the wind, sounds that he used to sit up in his bed
to catch with delight, as reminding him of nature, were now unheeded. He began at times to listen with sullen and horrible pleasure to the
cries of his miserable companions. He became squalid, listless, torpid,
and disgusting in his appearance. * * * * * * *

It was one of those dismal nights, that, as he tossed on his loathsome
bed,--more loathsome from the impossibility to quit it without feeling
more “unrest,”--he perceived the miserable light that burned in the
hearth was obscured by the intervention of some dark object. He turned
feebly towards the light, without curiosity, without excitement, but
with a wish to diversify the monotony of his misery, by observing the
slightest change made even accidentally in the dusky atmosphere of his
cell.