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.

It was a dismal and depressing sight to see a great city thus suddenly
overthrown; and the carpenter was deeply moved by the spectacle. As
usual, however, on the occasion of any great calamity, a crowd was
scouring the streets, whose sole object was plunder. While involved in
this crowd, near Temple Bar,--where the thoroughfare was most dangerous
from the masses of ruin that impeded it,--an individual, whose swarthy