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These resolutions were put to desperate trial that very night. Just next to Stanton’s apartment were lodged two most uncongenial neighbors. One of them was a puritanical weaver, who had been driven mad by a single sermon from the celebrated Hugh Peters, and was sent to the madhouse as full of election and reprobation as he could hold,–and fuller. He regularly repeated over the five points while daylight lasted, and imagined himself preaching in a conventicle with distinguished success; toward twilight his visions were more gloomy, and at midnight his blasphemies became horrible. In the opposite cell was lodged a loyalist tailor, who had been ruined by giving credit to the cavaliers and their ladies,–(for at this time, and much later, down to the reign of Anne, tailors were employed by females even to make and fit on their stays),–who had run mad with drink and loyalty on the burning of the Rump, and ever since had made the cells of the madhouse echo with fragments of the ill-fated Colonel Lovelace’s song, scraps from Cowley’s “Cutter of Coleman street,” and some curious specimens from Mrs. Aphra Behn’s plays, where the cavaliers are denominated the heroicks, and Lady Lambert and Lady Desborough represented as going to meeting, their large Bibles carried before them by their pages, and falling in love with two banished cavaliers by the way. The voice in which he shrieked out such words was powerfully horrible, but it was like the moan of an infant compared to the voice which took up and reechoed the cry, in a tone that made the building shake. It was the voice of a maniac, who had lost her husband, children, subsistence, and finally her reason, in the dreadful fire of London. The cry of fire never failed to operate with terrible punctuality on her associations. She had been in a disturbed sleep, and now started from it as suddenly as on that dreadful night. It was Saturday night too, and she was always observed to be particularly violent on that night,–it was the terrible weekly festival of insanity with her. She was awake, and busy in a moment escaping from the flames; and she dramatized the whole scene with such hideous fidelity, that Stanton’s resolution was far more in danger from her than from the battle between his neighbors Testimony and Hothead. She began exclaiming she was suffocated by the smoke; then she sprung from her bed, calling for a light, and appeared to be struck by the sudden glare that burst through her casement.–“The last day,” she shrieked, “The last day! The very heavens are on fire!”–“That will not come till the Man of Sin be first destroyed,” cried the weaver; “thou ravest of light and fire, and yet thou art in utter darkness.–I pity thee, poor mad soul, I pity thee!” The maniac never heeded him; she appeared to be scrambling up a staircase to her children’s room. She exclaimed she was scorched, singed, suffocated; her courage appeared to fail, and she retreated. “But my children are there!” she cried in a voice of unspeakable agony, as she seemed to make another effort; “here I am–here I am come to save you.–Oh God! They are all blazing!–Take this arm–no, not that, it is scorched and disabled– well, any arm–take hold of my clothes–no, they are blazing too!– Well, take me all on fire as I am!–And their hair, how it hisses!–Water, one drop of water for my youngest–he is but an infant–for my youngest, and let me burn!” She paused in horrid silence, to watch the fall of a blazing rafter that was about to shatter the staircase on which she stood.–“The roof has fallen on my head!” she exclaimed. “The earth is weak, and all the inhabitants thereof,” chanted the weaver; “I bear up the pillars of it.”