Читать книгу Sweet Hampstead and Its Associations онлайн

43 страница из 97

Twelve months later, when the Great Fire swept out as with the besom of destruction the germs of the plague, many of the fugitives from London watched from the Heath the destruction of their homes and property, the smoke of the city ascending ‘like the smoke of a great furnace,’ a smoke so dense and fearful that it ‘darkened the sun at noonday, and if at any time the sun peeped through, it looked as red as blood; through the long night there was no darkness of night;’ and, to add to these horrors, on the dreadful Wednesday night ‘the people of London, now of the fields,’ heard the murmur that the French were coming, and though, in the quaint language of the writer of the ‘City Remembrancer,’ ‘the women, naked and weak, did quake and tremble, many of the citizens began to stir themselves like lions or bears bereaved of their whelps, and “Arm! arm!” resounded through the woods and suburbs.’

These scenes, of which Hampstead Heath has been the centre, have long since faded out of the traditions of its inhabitants, like those of that still older night in 1588, when the cresset upon Beacon Hill blazed the approach of the Armada to its fellow on Hadley Church tower, and thence from cresset to cresset to the farthest North—scenes full of the tragic passions of human perplexity and terror.