In this phase of it, after the first, there were no compensations, but only degrees of misery. If my master had ever thought to make capital out of my restoration, he soon abandoned the idea as impracticable, and devoted all his persuasion to turning me, after the inhuman methods of his class, to his best profit. Once I stuck tight in one of those clogged “draw-in bends” which had been fatal to my predecessor. I could move no way, and in my struggles, a little crossed stay of iron, fixed in the chimney, so pressed upon my breast as almost to stop my heart. I was in a dreadful condition of terror and suffering, and in the midst he lit some damp straw on the hearth to smoke me down. The fumes took away my senses, and so, perhaps flattening the resistance of my lungs, released me. But I was in a sort of conscious delirium for days afterwards. Sometimes, where he had got the worst of a housewife’s bargaining, he would shout to me, working two-thirds up, “Pike the lew, boy!” which, in sweep’s jargon, meant, Leave the job unfinished, to spite the old slut! And then I would descend at once. Sometimes, where a cluster of flues ran into one shaft, I would come down into the wrong room, causing consternation amongst its inmates. But, through all, the idea of escape was very early a dead passion in me, so utterly in soot and sexlessness was I lost to any sense of self-identity. So, always homeless, always enslaved, always wandering, I was one day, some nine months after my abduction, come with my master into the neighbourhood of Streatham, which is a little rural suburb of London, reclaimed, with other contiguous hamlets, from the thick woods and gipsy-haunted commons of that part of the country. For some days past we had moved, unhurriedly as was our wont, through an atmosphere charged with a curious nervous excitement. Housewives, avoiding contact with us, as with possibly compromising emissaries of ill-omen, had vanished into their cottages as we came near; tavern cronies, grouped at tap-doors, were to be seen looking citywards, until dark, tramping up the long white roads, drove them within with unreasonable frights of shapeless things approaching. Then, sure enough, the night horizon grew patched with flaring cressets, and we learned that London was in the hands of a No-Popery mob. Its area of destruction spreading like an unchecked ink-blot, and we moving to meet it, brought us presently involved in the fringe of the disorder. Protestant Dulwich had sent its contingent to help petition Parliament against the legalising of the poor harried Catholics, and had got its warrant, as it chose to consider, for an anti-Romish crusade. And for that, whether right or wrong, I, at least, owe it gratitude.