It was drawing to the close of an almost tropical June day, that
the crowd who had thronged the precincts of St. Paul's since
early morning, began to disperse. The sun, that had throbbed the
livelong day like a great heart of fire in a sea of brass, was
sinking from sight in clouds of crimson, purple and gold, yet
Paul's Walk was crowded. There were court-gallants in ruffles
and plumes; ballad-singers chanting the not over-delicate ditties
of the Earl of Rochester; usurers exchanging gold for bonds worth
three times what they gave for them; quack-doctors reading in
dolorous tones the bills of mortality of the preceding day, and
selling plague-waters and anti-pestilential abominations, whose
merit they loudly extolled; ladies too, richly dressed, and many
of them masked; and booksellers who always made St. Paul's a
favorite haunt, and even to this day patronize its precincts, and
flourish in the regions of Paternoster Row and Ave Maria Lane;
court pages in rich liveries, pert and flippant; serving-men out
of place, and pickpockets with a keen eye to business; all
clashed and jostled together, raising a din to which the Plain of
Shinar, with its confusion of tongues and Babylonish workmen,
were as nothing.

Moving serenely through this discordant sea of his fellow-
creatures came a young man booted and spurred, whose rich doublet
of cherry colored velvet, edged and spangled with gold, and
jaunty hat set slightly on one side of his head, with its long
black plume and diamond clasp, proclaimed him to be somebody. A
profusion of snowy shirt-frill rushed impetuously out of his
doublet; a black-velvet cloak, lined with amber-satin, fell
picturesquely from his shoulders; a sword with a jeweled hilt