years before. So that the calamities that have fallen upon us by this cruelty of the weather are so much to be endured with the greater patience and with more thanksgiving to GOD; because His hand hath punished neighbours and other nations as heavily if not more severely than He hath us.
Amongst all the serious accidents that have happened here upon our Thames, I will now, father, quicken your hearing with one a little more merry. It was merry to the beholders and strange: but I believe he found no great mirth in it that was the person that performed it. But thus it was.
A citizen happened to venture with many others on the ice; but he, with a couple of dogs that followed him, walked up and down so long till he was, in a manner, alone from the rest of the company. You must understand that this was now towards the end of the frost; when it either began or was likely to thaw, so that the people were not so bold upon the ice, nor in such multitudes as they were before: but this citizen and his two dogs keeping, as I said, aloof from others; it fortuned that the flake of ice upon which he stood was in a moment sundered from the main body of the frozen Thames, like an arm of a tree cut from the body. So that he stood, or rather swam as he stood, upon a floating island. The poor man, perceiving that his ground failed under him, began to faint in his heart, repenting now that he was so venturous or so foolish as to leave firm ground where he was safe and to trust a floor that was so deceitful, was afraid to stir; and yet unless he did lustily stir for life, he was sure there was no way but one, and that was to be drowned. In this extremity and in this battle of comfort and despair, he had no means—albeit he was a fresh-water soldier—but to be constant in courage to himself and to try all paths how to get from this apparent danger. From place to place therefore doth he softly run, his two dogs following him close and leaping upon him: but his thoughts were more busied how to save himself than to regard them following. He never hated going a-hawking with his dogs till this time. Now the sport was loathsome; now was he weary of it. For in all his hunting with his hounds thus at his tail, he met one game that could make him weary: he jostled with other huge flakes of ice that encountered with that whereupon he stood; and gladly would have leaped upon some one of them,
