It was now the second week in September, and as yet Mr. Bloundel had received no tidings of his daughter.  At any other season he would have been seriously uneasy, but now, as has been already stated, all private grief was swallowed up in the horror of the general calamity.  Satisfied that she was in a healthful situation, and that her chance of preservation from the pestilence was better than that of any other member of his family, he turned his thoughts entirely to them.  Redoubling his precautions, he tried by every means to keep up the failing spirits of his household, and but rarely ventured to open his shutter, and look forth on the external world.

On the tenth of September, which was afterwards accounted the most fatal day of this fatal month, a young man of a very dejected appearance, and wearing the traces of severe suffering in his countenance, entered the west end of London, and took his way slowly towards the city.  He had passed Saint Giles’s without seeing a single living creature, or the sign of one in any of the houses.  The broad thoroughfare was completely grown over with grass, and the habitations had the most melancholy and deserted air imaginable.  Some doors and windows were wide open, discovering rooms with goods and furniture scattered about, having been left in this state by their inmates; but most part of them were closely fastened up.

As he proceeded along Holborn, the ravages of the scourge were yet more apparent.  Every house, on either side of the way, had a red cross, with the fatal inscription above it, upon the door.  Here and there, a watchman might be seen, looking more like a phantom than a living thing.  Formerly, the dead were conveyed away at night, but now the carts went about in the daytime.  On reaching Saint Andrew’s, Holborn, several persons were seen wheeling hand-barrows filled with corpses, scarcely covered with clothing, and revealing the blue and white stripes of the pestilence, towards a cart which was standing near the church gates.  The driver of the vehicle, a tall, cadaverous-looking man, was ringing his bell, and jesting with another person, whom the young man recognised, with a shudder, as Chowles.  The coffin-maker also recognised him at the same moment, and called to him, but the other paid no attention to the summons and passed on.

Crossing Holborn Bridge, he toiled faintly up the opposite hill, for he was evidently suffering from extreme debility, and on gaining the summit was obliged to support himself against a wall for a few minutes, before he could proceed.  The same frightful evidences of the ravages of the pestilence were observable here, as elsewhere.  The houses were all marked with the fatal cross, and shut up.  Another dead-cart was heard rumbling along, accompanied by the harsh cries of the driver, and the doleful ringing of the bell.  The next moment the loathly vehicle was seen coming along the Old Bailey.  It paused before a house, from which four bodies were brought, and