A Child's History of England.218

It broke out at a baker's shop near London Bridge, on the spot on which the Monument now stands as a remembrance of those raging flames. It spread and spread, and burned and burned, for three days. The nights were lighter than the days; in the daytime there was an immense cloud of smoke, and in the night-time there was a great tower of fire mounting up into the sky, which lighted the whole country landscape for ten miles round. Showers of hot ashes rose into the air and fell on distant places; flying sparks carried the conflagration [大火灾] to great distances, and kindled it in twenty new spots at a time; church steeples [尖塔] fell down with tremendous crashes; houses crumbled into cinders [残骸] by the hundred and the thousand. The summer had been intensely hot and dry, the streets were very narrow, and the houses mostly built of wood and plaster. Nothing could stop the tremendous fire, but the want of more houses to burn; nor did it stop until the whole way from the Tower to Temple Bar was a desert, composed of the ashes of thirteen thousand houses and eighty-nine churches.

This was a terrible visitation [灾难] at the time, and occasioned [导致] great loss and suffering to the two hundred thousand burnt-out people, who were obliged to lie in the fields under the open night sky, or in hastily-made huts of mud and straw, while the lanes and roads were rendered impassable by carts which had broken down as they tried to save their goods. But the Fire was a great blessing to the City afterwards, for it arose from its ruins very much improved - built more regularly, more widely, more cleanly and carefully, and therefore much more healthily. It might be far more healthy than it is, but there are some people in it still - even now, at this time, nearly two hundred years later - so selfish, so pig-headed, and so ignorant, that I doubt if even another Great Fire would warm them up to do their duty.

burnt-out people: 200,000. The Plague killed 100,000. 瘟疫有可能死了1/(1+2)=33%的人。

The Catholics were accused of having wilfully [deliberately] set London in flames; one poor Frenchman, who had been mad for years, even accused himself of having with his own hand fired the first house. There is no reasonable doubt, however, that the fire was accidental. An inscription on the Monument long attributed it to the Catholics; but it is removed now, and was always a malicious and stupid untruth.

六级/考研单词: monument, rage, flame, immense, mount, ash, spark, tremendous, crash, crumble, temple, compose, oblige, hut, mud, straw, render, cart, ruin, thereby, heal, ignorant, plague, attribute, malignant

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