There was over the door of the Council House of those days a statue of Justice, lacking the sword and the bandage. Vaughan, passing out in disgust from the meeting, pointed to it. “There is Bristol, gentlemen,” he said bitterly. “Your authorities have dropped the sword, and until they regain it we are helpless. I have done my best.” And, shrugging his shoulders, he started for Brereton’s lodgings to try a last appeal. He might well think it necessary. For a night which Bristol was long to remember was closing down upon the city. Though it was Sunday, the churches were empty; in few was a second service held. The streets, on the contrary, were full, in spite of the cold; full of noise and turmoil and disorder; of bands of men hastening up and down with reckless cries and flaring lights, at the bidding of leaders as unwitting. In Queen’s Square the rioters were drinking themselves drunk as at a fair, while amid the falling rain, through which the last stormy gleams of daylight strove to pass, amid the thickening dusk, those who all day long had jested at their doors began to turn doubtful looks on one another. From three points the smoke of fired prisons rose to the clouds and floated in a dense pall over the city; and men whispered that a hundred, two hundred, five hundred criminals had been set free. On Clifton Downs, on Brandon Hill, on College Green, on Redcliffe the thousand gazers of the morning were doubled and redoubled. But they no longer wore the cynical faces of the morning. On the contrary there were some who, following with their eyes the network of waterways laden with inflammable shipping, which pierced the city in every direction—who, tracing these and the cutthroat alleys and lanes about them, predicted that the morning would find Bristol a heap of ruins. And not a few, taking fright at the last moment, precipitately removed their families to Clifton, and locked up their houses. Vaughan, as he walked through the dusk, had those waterways, those lanes, those alleys, the congested heart of the old city, in his mind. He doubted, even he, if the hour for action was not past. Nor was he surprised when Brereton met his appeal with a flat _non possumus_. He was more struck with the change which twenty-four hours had wrought in the man. He looked worn and haggard. The shadows under his eyes were deeper, the eyes shone with a more feverish light. His dress, too, was careless and disordered, and while he was not still for a moment, he repeated what he said over and over again as if to persuade himself of its truth.