There were men there, who danced and
trampled on the beds of flowers as though they trod down human enemies,
and wrenched them from the stalks, like savages who twisted human necks.
There were men who cast their lighted torches in the air, and suffered
them to fall upon their heads and faces, blistering the skin with deep
unseemly burns. There were men who rushed up to the fire, and paddled
in it with their hands as if in water; and others who were restrained by
force from plunging in, to gratify their deadly longing. On the skull of
one drunken lad--not twenty, by his looks--who lay upon the ground with
a bottle to his mouth, the lead from the roof came streaming down in a
shower of liquid fire, white hot; melting his head like wax. When the
scattered parties were collected, men--living yet, but singed as with
hot irons--were plucked out of the cellars, and carried off upon the
shoulders of others, who strove to wake them as they went along, with
ribald jokes, and left them, dead, in the passages of hospitals. But of
all the howling throng not one learnt mercy from, or sickened at, these
sights; nor was the fierce, besotted, senseless rage of one man glutted.
Slowly, and in small clusters, with hoarse hurrahs and repetitions
of their usual cry, the assembly dropped away.
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