As the day crept on, still more unusual sights were witnessed in the
streets. The gates of the King's Bench and Fleet Prisons being opened at
the usual hour, were found to have notices affixed to them, announcing
that the rioters would come that night to burn them down. The wardens,
too well knowing the likelihood there was of this promise being
fulfilled, were fain to set their prisoners at liberty, and give
them leave to move their goods; so, all day, such of them as had any
furniture were occupied in conveying it, some to this place, some to
that, and not a few to the brokers' shops, where they gladly sold it,
for any wretched price those gentry chose to give. There were some
broken men among these debtors who had been in jail so long, and were
so miserable and destitute of friends, so dead to the world, and utterly
forgotten and uncared for, that they implored their jailers not to
set them free, and to send them, if need were, to some other place of
custody. But they, refusing to comply, lest they should incur the anger
of the mob, turned them into the streets, where they wandered up and
down hardly remembering the ways untrodden by their feet so long, and
crying--such abject things those rotten-hearted jails had made them--as
they slunk off in their rags, and dragged their slipshod feet along the
pavement.
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