moribund, but retired in disgust when they found that some forty
fishmongers had been engaged to purvey 'cod's head and lobsters' for a
person professing to be on the brink of the grave.

The street now became the scene of fearful distraction. Furious
tradesmen of every kind were ringing the house-bell, and rapping the
knocker for admittance--such, at least, as could press through the crowd
as far as the house. Bootmakers arrived with Hessians and
Wellingtons--'as per order'--or the most delicate of dancing-shoes for
the sober old lady; haberdashers had brought the last new thing in
evening dress, 'quite the fashion,' and 'very chaste:' hat-makers from
Lincoln and Bennett down to the Hebrew vendor in Marylebone Lane,
arrived with their crown-pieces; butchers' boys, on stout little nags,
could not get near enough to deliver the legs of mutton which had been
ordered; the lumbering coal-carts 'still stopped the way.' A crowd--the
easiest curiosity in the world to collect--soon gathered round the
motley mob of butchers, bakers, candlestick-makers, and makers and
sellers of everything else that mortal can want; the mob thronged the
pavement, the carts filled the road, and soon the carriages of the noble
of the land dashed up in all the panoply of state, and a demand was made
to clear the way for the Duke of Gloucester, for the Governor of the
Bank, the Chairman of the East India Company, and last, but, oh! not
least, the grandee whose successor the originator of the plot afterwards
so admirably satirized--the great Lord Mayor himself. The consternation,
disgust, and terror of the elderly female, the delight and chuckling of
Theodore and his accomplices, seated at a window on the opposite side of
the road, 'can be more easily imagined than described;' but what were
the feelings of tradesmen, professional men, gentlemen, noblemen, and
grand officials, who had been summoned from distant spots by artful
lures to No. 54, and there battled with a crowd in vain only to find