Thus provided, I ran out from Reading about seven in the evening, while
there was still some light, having spent there some nine hours. This was
the town where I first observed that shocking crush of humanity, which
I afterwards met in every large town west of London. Here, I should say,
the English were quite equal in number to the foreigners: and there were
enough of both, God knows: for London must have poured many here. There
were houses, in every room of which, and on the stairs, the dead
actually overlay each other, and in the streets before them were points
where only on flesh, or under carriages, was it possible to walk. I went
into the great County Gaol, from which, as I had read, the prisoners had
been released two weeks before-hand, and there I found the same pressed
condition, cells occupied by ten or twelve, the galleries continuously
rough-paved with faces, heads, and old-clothes-shops of robes; and in
the parade-ground, against one wall, a mass of human stuff, like tough
grey clay mixed with rags and trickling black gore, where a crush as of
hydraulic power must have acted.
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