By examining the deputies apart, and after much investigation, we learnt the true state of things at Paris.  Since parliament had elected him Ryland’s deputy, all the surviving English had submitted to Adrian.  He was our captain to lead us from our native soil to unknown lands, our lawgiver and our preserver.  On the first arrangement of our scheme of emigration, no continued separation of our members was contemplated, and the command of the whole body in gradual ascent of power had its apex in the Earl of Windsor.  But unforeseen circumstances changed our plans for us, and occasioned the greater part of our numbers to be divided for the space of nearly two months, from the supreme chief.  They had gone over in two distinct bodies; and on their arrival at Paris dissension arose between them.

They had found Paris a desert.  When first the plague had appeared, the return of travellers and merchants, and communications by letter, informed us regularly of the ravages made by disease on the continent.  But with the encreased mortality this intercourse declined and ceased.  Even in England itself communication from one part of the island to the other became slow and rare.  No vessel stemmed the flood that divided Calais from Dover; or if some melancholy voyager, wishing to assure himself of the life or death of his relatives, put from the French shore to return among us, often the greedy ocean swallowed his little craft, or after a day or two he was infected by the disorder, and died before he could tell the tale of the desolation of France.  We were therefore to a great degree ignorant of the state of things on the continent, and were not without some vague hope of finding numerous companions in its wide track.  But the same causes that had so fearfully diminished the English nation had had even greater scope for mischief in the sister land.  France was a blank; during the long line of road from Calais to Paris not one human being was found.  In Paris there were a few, perhaps a hundred, who, resigned to their coming fate, flitted about the streets of the capital and assembled to converse of past times, with that vivacity and even gaiety that seldom deserts the individuals of this nation.

The English took uncontested possession of Paris.  Its high houses and narrow streets were lifeless.  A few pale figures were to be distinguished at the accustomed resort at the Tuileries; they wondered wherefore the islanders should approach their ill-fated city—­for in the excess of wretchedness, the sufferers always imagine, that their part of the calamity is the bitterest, as, when enduring intense pain, we would exchange the particular torture we writhe under, for any other which should visit a different part of the frame.  They listened to the account the emigrants gave of their motives for leaving their native land, with a shrug almost of disdain—­“Return,” they said, “return to your island, whose sea breezes, and division from the continent gives some