The gray of a summer’s morning was yet hanging over the city, when a large number of workmen, each wearing the Lord Protector’s badge, gathered in detached parties about the Abbey. These men had been employed in the destruction of St. Mary’s Church but a few days before, and their coarse vestments were torn and covered with the lime and dust which they had brought from the ruin, a mark of their late sacrilegious employment, which brought upon them many a bitter taunt and frowning look from the wayfarers, even before they entered the parish of Westminster. So great was the manifestation of public resentment, that each band of workmen, as it went along, drew close together, and exhibited the pickaxes, crowbars, and other heavy tools of iron with which they were armed, like soldiers compelled on an irksome duty, but resolute to perform it. These men gathered slowly around the Abbey, and waited for a larger body of working-men, who were expected to leave their employment in the Strand and come to their assistance in a force and number that might awe the people into quiet submission to the injustice of their lord. The morning wore on, but they still lingered about the church, trifling with their heavy tools and talking together with some degree of anxiety, for the expected aid had not yet arrived, and each instant the streets and angles about the Abbey became more and more thronged with sullen and discontented men, all with lowering brows and flashing eyes, bent menacingly upon them. Still the crowd increased. Men hurried to and fro eagerly and with cloudy looks. The workmen gradually gathered in a close phalanx about the little church, whispered anxiously together, and brandished their tools with a faint show of defiance, yet seemed afraid or reluctant to level them against the sacred pile which stood among that mass of eager human beings in the cool morning light, quiet and tranquil as the spirit of holiness that brooded over its altar. Though the persons gathered about St. Margaret’s were considerable in numbers, they were not yet condensed into a form that could justly be termed a mob. The streets were alive, but not yet blocked up with people. Men, and even women, might pass to and fro on ordinary business without much fear of injury or interruption, but with a certainty of being jostled and pushed about by the scattered stream of human life that flowed toward the cathedral.