This is, of course, the Monument, which for many years indicated to all and sundry that the Great Fire of 1666 was the work of the Roman Catholics. Till the year 1831 the inscription, added in 1681 at the time of the Titus Oates affair, perpetuated the lie in stone, but in that year it was removed by the City Council. Now the gilt urn with its flames, which we can see well if we ascend the 345 steps to the iron cage at the top, merely commemorates the Fire itself, without any reference to its cause, as in the original structure. From the top of the Monument we can get perhaps the very finest of all views of London and its River. [Illustration: THE MONUMENT.] But there is one thing which should preface our account of the Great Fire, and that is an account of the Great Plague which visited and afflicted London in the previous year. Of course, the Fire was in one sense a terrible disaster for London, yet the destruction which it wrought was in reality a great blessing to the plague-ridden city. The Plague, by no means the first to visit London, came over from the Continent, where for years it had been decimating the large cities. It broke out with terrible power in the summer of the year 1665—a dry, scorching summer which made the flushing of the open street drains an impossible thing, and gave every help to the dread pestilence. If we want to read a thrilling description of London at this time we have only to turn to the “Journal of the Plague Year,” by Defoe, the author of “Robinson Crusoe.” This was not actually a journal, for Defoe was only four years old in 1665, but it was a faithful account based on first-hand information. In its simply written pages (to quote from Sir Walter Besant) “we see the horror of the empty streets; we hear the cries and lamentations of those who are seized and those who are bereaved. The cart comes slowly along the streets with the man ringing a bell and crying, ‘Bring out your dead! Bring out your dead!’ We think of the great holes into which the dead were thrown in heaps and covered with a little earth; we think of the grass growing in the streets; the churches deserted; the roads black with fugitives hurrying from the abode of Death; we hear the frantic mirth of revellers snatching to-night a doubtful rapture, for to-morrow they die. The City is filled with despair.” As we can well imagine, the King and his courtiers fled from Whitehall and the Tower away into the country; the Law Courts were shifted up river to Oxford. Naturally all business stopped, and trade was at a standstill. Ships in hundreds lay idle in the Pool, waiting for the cargoes which came not, because the wharves and warehouses were deserted; laden ships that sailed up the Thames speedily turned about and made for the Continental ports. So it went on, the visitation increasing in fury, till in September there were nearly 900 fell each day. Then it abated slightly, but continued through the winter, on into