Solomon Eagle, meanwhile, expressed his satisfaction at the apprentice’s compliance by his gestures, and, waving his staff round his head, pointed towards the west of the city, as if inquiring whether that was the route they meant to take.  Leonard nodded an affirmative; and, the enthusiast spreading out his arms and pronouncing an audible benediction over them, they resumed their course.  The streets were silent and deserted, except by the watchmen stationed at the infected dwellings, and a few sick persons stretched on the steps of some of the better habitations.  In order to avoid coming in contact with these miserable creatures, the party, with the exception of Doctor Hodges, kept in the middle of the road.  Attracted by the piteous exclamations of the sufferers, Doctor Hodges, ever and anon, humanely paused to speak to them; and he promised one poor woman, who was suckling an infant, to visit her on his return.

“I have no hopes of saving her,” he observed to Leonard, “but I may preserve her child.  There is an establishment in Aldgate for infants whose mothers have died of the plague, where more than a hundred little creatures are suckled by she-goats, and it is wonderful how well they thrive under their nurses.  If I can induce this poor woman to part with her child, I will send it thither.”

Just then, their attention was arrested by the sudden opening of a casement, and a middle-aged woman, wringing her hands, cried, with a look of unutterable anguish and despair—­“Pray for us, good people! pray for us!”

“We do pray for you, my poor soul!” rejoined Hodges, “as well as for all who are similarly afflicted.  What sick have you within?”

“There were ten yesterday,” replied the woman.  “Two have died in the night—­my husband and my eldest son—­and there are eight others whose recovery is hopeless.  Pray for us!  As you hope to be spared yourselves, pray for us!” And, with a lamentable cry, she closed the casement.

Familiarized as all who heard her were with spectacles of horror and tales of woe, they could not listen to this sad recital, nor look upon her distracted countenance, without the deepest commiseration.  Other sights had previously affected them, but not in the same degree.  Around the little conduit standing in front of the Old Change, at the western extremity of Cheapside, were three lazars laving their sores in the water; while, in the short space between this spot and Wood-street, Leonard counted upwards of twenty doors marked with the fatal red cross, and bearing upon them the sad inscription, “Lord have mercy upon us!”

A few minutes’ walking brought them to the grocer’s habitation, and on reaching it, they found that Blaize had already descended.  He was capering about the street with joy at his restoration to freedom.