“He is going to look at the ruins,” Godmother said. “Let us follow him.”
Their unconscious guide led them over mounds of hot ashes into Cheapside.
“Oh, Godmother, the beautiful Chepe! All in ruins!” cried Betty. A moment later she saw what had been the Exchange, and was now nothing but a blackened skeleton. Mr. Pepys was standing before its remains, looking from the heaps of broken statues on the ground to one still standing, upon which he gazed in astonishment.
“It’s the statue of its founder, Sir Thomas Gresham—the only one on the building not burnt, strangely enough,” Godmother said.
“Oh! that’s St. Paul’s; with the roof all fallen in. Scarcely any of it left,” Betty exclaimed sorrowfully.
“A miserable sight, my Lord!” she heard Mr. Pepys remark with a low bow to a gentleman who stood near him among the crowd of dejected sightseers.
“The old Grey Friars’ church is gone, you notice,” Godmother said. “This, you remember, was Christ’s Hospital—the Blue Coat School, now all in ruins. Acres of streets and houses are destroyed, with more than eighty churches and an enormous number of schools and hospitals and public buildings of all sorts. In fact, old London, as you see, has practically vanished.”
“It’s too sad,” sighed Betty, looking round her at the ruin and desolation. “I don’t want to see any more. Look at those people crying. I suppose that heap of rubbish was their home?... Do let us go back to our own time, Godmother!”
In another flash they were there, and Betty, as usual when she returned so mysteriously to everyday life, rubbed her eyes.
“Poor London!” she sighed. “First the Plague, and then that awful Fire. I should think it was the worst fire that ever happened to a city, wasn’t it?”