The year after, which finds them in Bunhill Row again, brings that great London fire which the Monument now commemorates; they passing three days and nights upon the edge of that huge tempest of flame and smoke which devoured nearly two-thirds of London; the old poet hearing the din and roar and crackle, and feeling upon his forehead the waves of fierce heat and the showers of cinders--a scene and an experience which might have given, perhaps, other color to his pictures of Pandemonium, if his great poem had not been just now, in these fateful years, completed--completed and bargained for; £20 were to be paid for it conditionally,[68] in four payments of £5 each, at a day when London had been decimated by the plague, and half the city was a waste of ruin and ashes. And to give an added tint of blackness to the picture, we have to fancy his three daughters leaving him, as they did, tired of tasks, tired of wrangling. Anne, the infirm one, who neither read nor wrote, and Mary, so overworked, and Deborah, the youngest (latterly being very helpful)--all desert him. They never return. “Undutiful daughters,” he says to Ellwood; but I think he does not soften toward them, even when gone. Poor, stern, old man! He would have cut them off by will from their small shares of inheritance in his estate; but the courts wisely overruled this. Anne, strangely enough, married--dying shortly after; Mary died years later, a spinster; and Deborah, who became Mrs. Clark, had some notice, thirty years later, when it was discovered that a quiet woman of that name was Milton’s daughter. But she seems to have been of a stolid make; no poetry, no high sense of dignity belonging to her; a woman like ten thousand, whose descendants are now said (doubtfully) to be living somewhere in India. But Milton wrought on; his wife Betty, of whom he spoke more affectionately than ever once of his daughters, humored his poor fagged appetites of the table. _Paradise Regained_ was in hand; and later the “Samson Agonistes.” His habits were regular; up at five o’clock; a chapter of the Hebrew Bible read to him by his daughter Mary--what time she stayed; an early breakfast, and quiet lonely contemplation after it (his nephew tells us) till seven. Then work came, putting Quaker Ellwood to helpful service, or whoever happened in, and could fathom the reading--this lasting till mid-day dinner; afterward a walk in his garden (when he had one) for two hours, in his old gray suit, in which many a time passers-by saw him sitting at his door. There was singing in later afternoon, when there was a voice to sing for him; and instrumental music, when his, or a friendly hand touched the old organ. After supper, a pipe and a glass of water; always persistently temperate; and then, night and rest.