Explore "Jane Shore" by Bernard Capes on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
It was a bitter Sunday in January, 1484. A little dry snow fell from time to time, and, so surely as its chill dust whitened the stones about St. Paul's Church, a wind, like an officious tipstaff, would come and drive it away right and left, sweeping the pavement for bare footsteps that were to follow.
It was all sad and grey and wintry. The over-gabled houses seemed to totter with cold; the signboards cried with it; only the church itself, half-shrouded in mist, loomed like some mighty mountain-crag, soaring into one solitary pinnacle, spectral, stupendous, in its midst. The Sabbath folk in the streets below, released from Mass, wrung their frosty fingers as they lingered in dull excitement, waiting for the show that was to follow. They gathered in a swarm about the great west door; but mostly they flocked towards the north side, where in an open place stood the cross of St. Paul's, surmounting the leaden roof of a little timber pavilion. This bothy, or pulpit, was like a dovecot in shape, hexagonal, and with a window in each of its six sides. That facing west was furnished with a lectern for the preacher; and the whole building was reared on a triple platform of stone, hexagonal like the other, and forming steps to it.