510 London in 1857 . 



I was perfectly bewildered : words cannot express my astonish" 

 ment. I stood petrified, doubting almost if I lived, and very much 

 inclined to believe I was in some singular and horrible dream. Let 

 the reader carefully consider my situation I was alone, one solitary 

 individual, in the very midst of London, in one of its most thickly popu- 

 lated streets, standing in the midst of four ways, and alternately looking 

 down each, vainly expecting to see some person or some symptom of 

 inhabitants. It was standing, truly, in the City of the Dead ! Let 

 the reader, with his knowledge of what London is every day, with 

 his remembrances of crowded streets, bustling throngs, rattle and 

 rumble of wheels heavy and light, chaos of carriages, oceans of 

 people, the never-ceasing activity, the immense stir and agitation, 

 the variety of objects and employments, the clash of conflicting 

 interests and pursuits, the vast and apparently more than mortal 

 turbulence of an overgrown metropolis like London, fancy himself 

 standing, like me, alone ALONE in its deserted streets, the only 

 survivor of a general destruction ; the last man in a populous world, 

 the only human being among the habitations of thousands, and scores 

 of increasing thousands, the sole wretch existent from a universal 

 wreck. And then the houses were so large, so proud, so towering, 

 drawing sullenly away till lost in the dimness of perspective distance ; 

 the pavements could now only echo back my single, solitary 

 tread ; the roads, the files of lamps, the sea of streets were around me, 

 and I was unconnected, cut off from my kind, with nothing but my 

 single voice in this gigantic and awful solitude a voice how soon 

 lost amidst the myriads of buildings that shut me in their still and 

 tomblike recesses! how feebly returned from the chill, repulsive 

 architectural surfaces, which rose up sadly and freezingly before me. 

 All London was mine. I was the possessor of countless treasures, 

 of piles of wealth that would baffle the most exquisite resources of 

 arithmetic ! I could enter every shop and ransack its stores without 

 word or molestation. For years could I employ myself in examin- 

 ing each house, and going from one to another, from street to street, 

 from district to district, till, maddened by my unearthly solitude, my 

 more than mortal torture, I seized a torch, sought one of the num- 

 berless repositories of combustibles that were scattered around me, 

 and, firing the magazine, put an end to the horrors that silently stared 

 me to death around, by burning the one mighty grave of humanity, 

 witnessing, alone, the conflagration of the modern Babylon, and 

 perishing in the flames of my colossal mausoleum! 



Oh, what a sight I thought would such a scene be ! what could be 

 my sensations in witnessing, without a soul to share its terrible, its 

 overwhelming grandeur, so splendid, yet so awful a catastrophe ! 

 What companion should I have, but that superhuman element which 

 I should call into existence by my own weak hands, and which, 

 mastering in the moment of its fearful creation the being that pro- 

 duced it, would soar above my puny Teachings, tear down the autho- 

 rity that birthed it, laugh to scorn the powerless insect that acci- 

 dentally broke the iron spell which bound its brazen, bursting limbs, 

 and let the gigantic demon rush forth upon the earth, destruction in 

 its flashing eye-balls and the red shafts of conflagration in its trem- 



