Taken thus by surprise, the Colonel shuddered as at the contact of something unclean and horrible. Hastily he stepped out into the middle of the unpaved street, and, pausing there a moment, glanced up at the closed shutters of the infected house. It was the first that he had seen; for although he had come this way a week ago, when the plague was already active in the neighbourhood, yet it was then confined to Butcher’s Row on the north side of the church and to the mean streets that issued thence. To find it thus upon the main road between the City and Whitehall was to be rendered unpleasantly conscious of its spread. And, as he now pursued his way with instinctively quickened steps, he found his thoughts thrust more closely than ever upon the uses which the revolutionaries could make of this dread pestilence. Much brooding in his disturbed state of mind distorted his mental vision, so that he came presently to adopt the view that this plague was a visitation from Heaven upon a city abandoned to ungodliness. Heaven, it followed, must be on the side of those who laboured to effect a purifying change. The end of it was that, as he toiled up Ludgate Hill towards Paul’s, his resolve was taken. That evening he would seek Tucker and throw in his lot with the republicans. Coming into Paul’s Yard, he found a considerable crowd assembled before the western door of the Cathedral. It was composed of people of all degrees: merchants, shopkeepers, prentices, horseboys, scavengers, rogues from the alleys that lay behind the Old ’Change, idlers and sharpers from Paul’s Walk, with a sprinkling of women, of town-gallants, and of soldiers. And there, upon the steps of the portico, stood the magnet that had drawn them in the shape of that black crow of a Jack Presbyter preaching the City’s doom. And his text--recurring like the refrain of a song--was ever the same: “Ye have defiled your sanctuaries by the multitude of your iniquities, by the iniquity of your traffic.” And yet, from between the Corinthian pillars which served him for his background, had been swept away the milliners’ shops that had stood there during the Commonwealth. Whether some thought of this in the minds of his audience rendered his words humorously inapt, or whether it was merely that a spirit of irresponsible ribaldry was infused into the crowd by a crowd of young apprentices, loud derision greeted the preacher’s utterance. Unshaken by the laughter and mocking cries, the prophet of doom presented a fearless and angry front. “Repent, ye scoffers!” His voice shrilled to dominate their mirthful turbulence. “Bethink you of where ye stand! Yet forty days and London shall be destroyed! The pestilence lays siege unto this city of the ungodly! Like a raging lion doth it stalk round, seeking where it may leap upon you. Yet forty days, and....”