in a voice of unspeakable agony, as she seemed to make another effort; “here I am—­here I am come to save you.—­Oh God!  They are all blazing!—­Take this arm—­no, not that, it is scorched and disabled—­ well, any arm—­take hold of my clothes—­no, they are blazing too!—­ Well, take me all on fire as I am!—­And their hair, how it hisses!—­Water, one drop of water for my youngest—­he is but an infant—­for my youngest, and let me burn!” She paused in horrid silence, to watch the fall of a blazing rafter that was about to shatter the staircase on which she stood.—­“The roof has fallen on my head!” she exclaimed.  “The earth is weak, and all the inhabitants thereof,” chanted the weaver; “I bear up the pillars of it.”

The maniac marked the destruction of the spot where she thought she stood by one desperate bound, accompanied by a wild shriek, and then calmly gazed on her infants as they rolled over the scorching fragments, and sunk into the abyss of fire below.  “There they go,—­ one—­two—­three—­all!” and her voice sunk into low mutterings, and her convulsions into faint, cold shudderings, like the sobbings of a spent storm, as she imagined herself to “stand in safety and despair,” amid the thousand houseless wretches assembled in the suburbs of London on the dreadful nights after the fire, without food, roof, or raiment, all gazing on the burning ruins of their dwellings and their property.  She seemed to listen to their complaints, and even repeated some of them very affectingly, but invariably answered them with the same words, “But I have lost all my children—­all!” It was remarkable, that when this sufferer began to rave, all the others became silent.  The cry of nature hushed every other cry,—­she was the only patient in the house who was not mad from politics, religion, ebriety, or some perverted passion; and terrifying as the outbreak of her frenzy always was, Stanton used to await it as a kind of relief from the dissonant, melancholy, and ludicrous ravings of the others.

But the utmost efforts of his resolution began to sink under the continued horrors of the place.  The impression on his senses began to defy the power of reason to resist them.  He could not shut out these frightful cries nightly repeated, nor the frightful sound of the whip employed to still them.  Hope began to fail him, as he observed, that the submissive tranquillity (which he had imagined, by obtaining increased indulgence, might contribute to his escape, or perhaps convince the keeper of his sanity) was interpreted by the callous ruffian, who was acquainted only with the varieties of madness, as a more refined species of that cunning which he was well accustomed to watch and baffle.