The next day he went to see the Fire again. All Fleet Street and the parts around it were in flames, the lead running down the streets in a stream, the stones of St. Paul’s “flying like granados.” The people, to the number of 200,000, had taken refuge in St. George’s Fields and Moorfields as far as Islington and Highgate; there Evelyn visited them; they were lying beside their heaps of salvage, of all ranks and degrees, deploring their loss, and though ready to perish for hunger and destitution, yet not asking one penny for relief. It was not money they wanted, it was food and shelter. Can one conceive a picture more sorrowful than that of 200,000 people thus wholly ruined? Evelyn went home, and at once set to work on a plan for the reconstruction of the City. [Illustration: JOHN EVELYN (1620–1706)] Pepys has preserved fuller details:— “So I down to the water-side, and there got a boat and through bridge, and there saw a lamentable fire. Poor Michell’s house, as far as the Old Swan, already burned that way, and the fire running further, that in a very little time it got as far as the Steelyard while I was there. Everybody endeavouring to remove their goods, and flinging into the river or bringing them into lighters that lay off: poor people staying in their houses as long as till the very fire touched them, and then running into boats, or clambering from one pair of stairs by the water-side to another. And among other things, the poor pigeons, I perceive, were loth to leave their houses, but hovered about the windows and balconys till some of them burned their wings and fell down. Having staid, and in an hour’s time seen the fire rage every way, and nobody, to my sight, endeavouring to quench it, but only to remove their goods, and leave all to the fire, and having seen it get as far as the Steelyard, and the wind mighty high and driving it into the City, and everything after so long a drought, proving combustible, even the very stones of churches, and among other things the poor steeple by which pretty Mrs. —— lives, and whereof my old schoolfellow Elborough is parson, taken fire in the very top and there burned till it fell down: I to White Hall (with a gentleman with me who desired to go off from the Tower to see the Fire, in my boat), and to White Hall, and there up to the King’s closett in the Chappell, where people come about me, and I did give them an account dismayed them all, and the word was carried in to the King. So I was called for, and did tell the King and Duke of York what I saw, and that unless His Majesty did command houses to be pulled down, nothing could stop the fire.”... “Walked along Watling Street, as well as I could, every creature coming away loaden with goods to save, and here and there sicke people carried away in beds. Extraordinary good goods carried in carts and on backs. At last met ye Lord Mayor in Canning Street, like a man spent, with a handkercher about his neck. To the King’s message he cried