come, instinctively straightened her cap, smoothed out her dress of
molleton, and put on her sabots. A carpenter, hearing her terrified
exclamations, put on his sabots also, stooped whimpering to the stream
running from the Rue d'Egypte, and began to wash his face. A dozen of
his neighbours did the same. Some of the women, however, went on
knitting hard, as they gabbled prayers and looked at the fast-blackening
sun. Knitting was to Jersey women, like breathing or tale-bearing, life
itself. With their eyes closing upon earth they would have gone on
knitting and dropped no stitches.

A dusk came down like that over Pompeii and Herculaneum. The tragedy of
fear went hand in hand with burlesque commonplace. The grey stone walls
of the houses grew darker and darker, and seemed to close in on the
dumfounded, hysterical crowd. Here some one was shouting command to
imaginary militia; there an aged crone was offering, without price,
simnels and black butter, as a sort of propitiation for an imperfect
past; and from a window a notorious evil-liver was frenziedly crying that
she had heard the devil and his Rocbert witches revelling in the prison
dungeons the night before. Thereupon a long-haired fanatic, once a
barber, with a gift for mad preaching, sprang upon the Pompe des
Brigands, and declaring that the Last Day was come, shrieked:

"The Spirit of the Lord is upon me! He hath sent me to proclaim
liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that
are bound!"

Some one thrust into his hand a torch. He waved it to and fro in his
wild harangue; he threw up his arms towards the ominous gloom, and with
blatant fury ordered open the prison doors. Other torches and candles
appeared, and the mob trembled to and fro in delirium.