So far, and until they reached the Tower, their road was familiar enough; but from Smithfield onwards they had to halt and inquire their way again and again in intervals of threading the traffic which poured out of cross-streets and to and from the docks on their right—­wagons empty, wagons laden with hides, jute, scrap-iron, tallow, indigo, woollen bales, ochre, sugar; trollies and pack-horses; here and there a cordon of porters and warehousemen trundling barrels as nonchalantly as a child his hoop.  The business of piloting his mother through these cross-tides left Charles little time for observation; but one incident of that walk he never forgot.

They were passing Shadwell when they came on a knot of people and two watchmen posted at the corner of a street across which a reek of smoke mingled with clouds of gritty dust.  Twice or thrice they heard a crash or dull rumble of falling masonry.  A distillery had been blazing there all night and a gang of workmen was now clearing the ruins.  But as Charles and his mother came by the corner, the knot of people parted and gave passage to a line of stretchers—­six stretchers in all, and on each a body, which the bearers had not taken the trouble to cover from view.  A bystander said that these were men who had run back into the building to drink the flaming spirit, and had dropped insensible, and been crushed when the walls fell in.  The boy had never seen death before; and at the sight of it thrust upon him in this brutal form, he put out a hand towards his mother to find that she too was swaying.

“Hallo!” cried the same bystander, “look out there! the lady’s fainting.”

But Mrs. Wesley steadied herself. “’Tis not that,” she gasped, at the same time waving him off; “’tis the fire—­the fire!” And stepping by the crossing she fled along the street with Charles at her heels, nor ceased running for another hundred yards.  “You do not remember,” she began, turning at length; “no, of course you do not.  You were a babe, not two years old; nurse snatched you out of bed—­”

The odd thing was that, despite the impossibility, Charles seemed to remember quite clearly.  As a child he had heard his sisters talk so often of the fire at Epworth Rectory that the very scene—­and especially Jacky’s escape—­was bitten on the blank early pages as a real memory.  He had half a mind now to question his mother about it and startle her with details, but her face forbade him.

She recovered her colour in bargaining with a waterman at Blackwall Stairs.  Two stately Indiamen lay out on the river below, almost flank by flank; and, as it happened, the farther one was at that moment weighing her anchor, indeed had it tripped on the cathead.  A cloud of boats hung about her, trailing astern as her head-sails drew and she began to gather way on the falling tide.

The waterman, a weedy loafer with a bottle nose and watery blue eyes, agreed to pull across for threepence; but no sooner were they embarked and on the tide-way, than he lay on his oars and jerked his thumb towards the moving ship.  “Make it a crown, ma’am, and I’ll overhaul her,” he hiccupped.