“It’s an ill wind that blows nobody good,” thought the carpenter, turning his attention to the child, whose feeble struggles and cries proclaimed that, as yet, life had not been extinguished by the hardships it had undergone.  “Poor little creature!” he muttered, pressing it tenderly to his breast, as he grasped the rope and clambered up to the window:  “if thou hast, indeed, lost both thy parents, as that terrible man said just now, thou art not wholly friendless and deserted, for I myself will be a father to thee!  And in memory of this dreadful night, and the death from which I have, been the means of preserving thee, thou shalt bear the name of THAMES DARRELL.”

No sooner had Wood crept through the window, than nature gave way, and he fainted.  On coming to himself, he found he had been wrapped in a blanket and put to bed with a couple of hot bricks to his feet.  His first inquiries were concerning the child, and he was delighted to find that it still lived and was doing well.  Every care had been taken of it, as well as of himself, by the humane inmates of the house in which he had sought shelter.

About noon, next day, he was able to move; and the gale having abated, he set out homewards with his little charge.

The city presented a terrible picture of devastation.  London Bridge had suffered a degree less than most places.  But it was almost choked up with fallen stacks of chimneys, broken beams of timber, and shattered tiles.  The houses overhung in a frightful manner, and looked as if the next gust would precipitate them into the river.  With great difficulty, Wood forced a path through the ruins.  It was a work of no slight danger, for every instant a wall, or fragment of a building, came crashing to the ground.  Thames Street was wholly impassable.  Men were going hither and thither with barrows, and ladders and ropes, removing the rubbish, and trying to support the tottering habitations.  Grace-church Street was entirely deserted, except by a few stragglers, whose curiosity got the better of their fears; or who, like the carpenter, were compelled to proceed along it.  The tiles lay a foot thick in the road.  In some cases they were ground almost to powder; in others, driven deeply into the earth, as if discharged from a piece of ordnance.  The roofs and gables of many of the houses had been torn off.  The signs of the shops were carried to incredible distances.  Here and there, a building might be seen with the doors and windows driven in, and all access to it prevented by the heaps of bricks and tilesherds.

Through this confusion the carpenter struggled on;—­now ascending, now descending the different mountains of rubbish that beset his path, at the imminent peril of his life and limbs, until he arrived in Fleet Street.  The hurricane appeared to have raged in this quarter with tenfold fury.  Mr. Wood scarcely knew where he was.  The old aspect of the place was gone.  In lieu of the substantial habitations which he had gazed on overnight, he beheld a row of falling scaffoldings, for such they seemed.