the story of the broken glass and the duel in the garden. It
became monstrous and omnipresent, as do in our time the
unimportant doings of the sect of the Agapemonites, or as did at
an earlier time the dreary dishonesties of the Rhodesian
financiers. Questions were asked about it, and even answered, in
the House of Commons. The Government was solemnly denounced in
the papers for not having done something, nobody knew what, to
prevent the window being broken. An enormous subscription was
started to reimburse Mr. Gordon, the man who had been gagged in
the shop. Mr. MacIan, one of the combatants, became for some
mysterious reason, singly and hugely popular as a comic figure in
the comic papers and on the stage of the music hall. He was
always represented (in defiance of fact), with red whiskers, and
a very red nose, and in full Highland costume. And a song,
consisting of an unimaginable number of verses, in which his name
was rhymed with flat iron, the British Lion, sly 'un, dandelion,
Spion (With Kop in the next line), was sung to crowded houses
every night. The papers developed a devouring thirst for the
capture of the fugitives; and when they had not been caught for
forty-eight hours, they suddenly turned the whole matter into a
detective mystery. Letters under the heading, "Where are They,"
poured in to every paper, with every conceivable kind of
explanation, running them to earth in the Monument, the Twopenny
Tube, Epping Forest, Westminster Abbey, rolled up in carpets at
Shoolbreds, locked up in safes in Chancery Lane. Yes, the papers
were very interesting, and Mr. Turnbull unrolled a whole bundle
of them for the amusement of Mr. MacIan as they sat on a high
common to the north of London, in the coming of the white dawn.

The darkness in the east had been broken with a bar of grey; the