I remember she had the news to give me on the very day when the Muff and Tippet Company shut up, after swallowing a capital of 300,000_l_. as some said, and nothing to show for it except a treaty with some Indians, who had afterwards tomahawked the agent of the Company.  Some people said there were no Indians, and no agent to be tomahawked at all; but that the whole had been invented in a house in Crutched Friars.  Well, I pitied poor Tidd, whose 20,000_l_. were thus gone in a year, and whom I met in the City that day with a most ghastly face.  He had 1,000_l_. of debts, he said, and talked of shooting himself; but he was only arrested, and passed a long time in the Fleet.  Mary’s delightful news, however, soon put Tidd and the Muff and Tippet Company out of my head; as you may fancy.

Other circumstances now occurred in the City of London which seemed to show that our Director was—­what is not to be found in Johnson’s Dictionary—­rather shaky.  Three of his companies had broken; four more were in a notoriously insolvent state; and even at the meetings of the directors of the West Diddlesex, some stormy words passed, which ended in the retirement of several of the board.  Friends of Mr. B.’s filled up their places:  Mr. Puppet, Mr. Straw, Mr. Query, and other respectable gents, coming forward and joining the concern.  Brough and Hoff dissolved partnership; and Mr. B. said he had quite enough to do to manage the I. W. D., and intended gradually to retire from the other affairs.  Indeed, such an Association as ours was enough work for any man, let alone the parliamentary duties which Brough was called on to perform, and the seventy-two lawsuits which burst upon him as principal director of the late companies.

Perhaps I should here describe the desperate attempts made by Mrs. Hoggarty to introduce herself into genteel life.  Strange to say, although we had my Lord Tiptoff’s word to the contrary, she insisted upon it that she and Lady Drum were intimately related; and no sooner did she read in the Morning Post of the arrival of her Ladyship and her granddaughters in London, than she ordered the fly before mentioned, and left cards at their respective houses:  her card, that is—­“MRS. HOGGARTY of CASTLE HOGGARTY,” magnificently engraved in Gothic letters and flourishes; and ours, viz., “Mr. and Mrs. S. Titmarsh,” which she had printed for the purpose.

She would have stormed Lady Jane Preston’s door and forced her way upstairs, in spite of Mary’s entreaties to the contrary, had the footman who received her card given her the least encouragement; but that functionary, no doubt struck by the oddity of her appearance, placed himself in the front of the door, and declared that he had positive orders not to admit any strangers to his lady.  On which Mrs. Hoggarty clenched her fist out of the coach-window, and promised that she would have him turned away.