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Robert Hugh Benson
Oddsfish!
Published by Good Press, 2019
EAN 4057664600998
Table of Contents
CHAPTER I
I came to London on the fifteenth of June, having left it seven years before in company with my father, to go to Paris, two years before he died.
It was drawing on to sunset as we rode up through the Southwark fields and, at the top of a little eminence in the ground saw for the first time plainly all the City displayed before us.
We came along the Kent road, having caught sight again and again of such spires as had risen after the Great Fire, and of the smoke that rose from the chimneys; but I may say that I was astonished at the progress the builders had made from what I could remember of seven years before. Then there had still been left great open spaces where there should have been none; now it was a city once more; and even the Cathedral shewed its walls and a few roofs above the houses. The steeples too of Sir Christopher Wren's new churches pricked everywhere; though I saw later that there was yet much building to be done, both in these and in many of the greater houses. My man James rode with me; (for I had been careful not to form too great intimacies with the party with whom I had ridden from Dover); and I remarked to him upon the matter.
"And there, sir," he said to me, pointing to it, "is the monument no doubt that they have raised to it."
And so we found it to be a day or two later—a tall pillar, with an inscription upon it saying that the Fire had been caused by the Papists—a black lie, as every honest man knows.
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