in virtue of the notice they had received.  The maid-servant had only just time to assure them that all the chimneys were clean, and their services were not required, when some dozen of coal-carts drew up as near as possible to the ill-fated house.  New protestations, new indignation.  The grimy and irate coalheavers were still being discoursed with, when a bevy of neat and polite individuals arrived from different quarters, bearing each under his arm a splendid ten-guinea wedding-cake.  The maid grew distracted; her mistress was single, and had no intention of doubling herself; there must be some mistake; the confectioners were dismissed, in a very different humour to that with which they had come.  But they were scarcely gone when crowds began to storm the house, all ‘on business.’  Rival doctors met in astonishment and disgust, prepared for an accouchement; undertakers stared one another mutely in the face, as they deposited at the door coffins made to order—­elm or oak—­so many feet and so many inches; the clergymen of all the neighbouring parishes, high church or low church, were ready to minister to the spiritual wants of the unfortunate 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,