Besides booksellers,
there were seamstresses, tobacco-merchants, vendors of fruit and
provisions, and Jews--all of whom had stalls within the cathedral, and
who were now making preparations for the business of the day. Shortly
afterwards, numbers who came for recreation and amusement made their
appearance, and before ten o'clock, Paul's Walk, as the nave was termed,
was thronged, by apprentices, rufflers, porters, water-carriers,
higglers, with baskets on their heads, or under their arms, fish-wives,
quack-doctors, cutpurses, bonarobas, merchants, lawyers, and
serving-men, who came to be hired, and who stationed themselves near an
oaken block attached to one of the pillars, and which was denominated,
from the use it was put to, the "serving-man's log." Some of the crowd
were smoking, some laughing, others gathering round a ballad-singer, who
was chanting one of Rochester's own licentious ditties; some were buying
quack medicines and remedies for the plague, the virtues of which the
vendor loudly extolled; while others were paying court to the dames,
many of whom were masked. Everything seemed to be going forward within
this sacred place, except devotion. Here, a man, mounted on the carved
marble of a monument, bellowed forth the news of the Dutch war, while
another, not far from him, on a bench, announced in lugubrious accents
the number of those who had died on the previous day of the pestilence.
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