’You’re in view of it in a minute.  And what a square, for recreative dancing!  And what a people, to be turning it into a place of political agitation!  And what a country, where from morning to night it’s an endless wrangle about the first conditions of existence!  Old Colney seems right now and then:  they ’re the offspring of pirates, and they ’ve got the manners and tastes of their progenitors, and the trick of quarrelling everlastingly over the booty.  I ’d have band-music here for a couple of hours, three days of the week at the least; and down in the East; and that forsaken North quarter of London; and the Baptist South too.  But just as those omnibus-wheels are the miserable music of this London of ours, it ’s only too sadly true that the people are in the first rumble of the notion of the proper way to spend their lives.  Now you see the shop:  Boyle and Luckwort:  there.’

Victor looked.  He threw his coat open, and pulled the waistcoat, and swelled it, ahemming.  ‘That shop?’ said he.  And presently:  ’Fenellan, I’m not superstitious, I think.  Now listen; I declare to you, on the day of our drinking Old Veuve together last—­you remember it,—­I walked home up this way across the square, and I was about to step into that identical shop, for some household prescription in my pocket, having forgotten Nataly’s favourite City chemists Fenbird and Jay, when—­I’m stating a fact—­I distinctly—­I ’m sure of the shop—­felt myself plucked back by the elbow; pulled back the kind of pull when you have to put a foot backward to keep your equilibrium.’

So does memory inspired by the sensations contribute an additional item for the colouring of history.

He touched the elbow, showed a flitting face of crazed amazement in amusement, and shrugged and half-laughed, dismissing the incident, as being perhaps, if his hearer chose to have it so, a gem of the rubbish tumbled into the dustcart out of a rather exceptional householder’s experience.

Fenellan smiled indulgently.  ’Queer things happen.  I recollect reading in my green youth of a clergyman, who mounted a pulpit of the port where he was landed after his almost solitary rescue from a burning ship at midnight in mid-sea, to inform his congregation, that he had overnight of the catastrophe a personal Warning right in his ear from a Voice, when at his bed or bunk-side, about to perform the beautiful ceremony of undressing:  and the Rev. gentleman was to lie down in his full uniform, not so much as to relieve himself of his boots, the Voice insisted twice; and he obeyed it, despite the discomfort to his poor feet; and he jumped up in his boots to the cry of Fire, and he got them providentially over the scuffling deck straight at the first rush into the boat awaiting them, and had them safe on and polished the day he preached the sermon of gratitude for the special deliverance.  There was a Warning! and it might well be called, as he called it, from within.  We’re cared for, never doubt.  Aide-toi.  Be ready dressed to help yourself in a calamity, or you’ll not stand in boots at your next Sermon, contrasting with the burnt.  That sounds like the moral.’