presented to them such a contrast as might be shown if we could imagine the Lethean ferry-boatload brought sharp against Pomona’s lapful.  In addition to the plucked flowers and fruits of the shop, Rose Mackrell more attentively examined the samples doing service at the counters.  They were three, under supervision of a watchful-eyed fourth.  Dame Gossip is for quoting his wit.  But the conclusion he reached, after quitting the shop and pacing his dozen steps, is important; for it sent a wind over the town to set the springs of tattle going as wildly as when the herald’s trumpet blew the announcement for the world to hear out of Wales.

He had observed, that the young woman supervising was deficient in the ease of an established superior; her brows were troubled; she was, therefore, a lieutenant elevated from a lower grade; and, to his thinking, conducted the business during the temporary retirement of the mistress of the shop.

And the mistress of the shop?

The question hardly needs be put.

Rose Mackrell or his humour answered it in unfaltering terms.

London heard, with the variety of feelings which are indistinguishable under a flooding amazement, that the beautiful new fruit and flower shop had been purchased and stocked by the fabulously wealthy young Earl of Fleetwood, to give his Whitechapel Countess a taste for business, an occupation, and an honourable means of livelihood.

There was, Dame Gossip thumps to say, a general belief in this report.  Crowds were on the pavement, peering through the shop-windows.  Carriages driving by stopped to look.  My lord himself had been visible, displaying his array of provisions to friends.  Nor was credulity damped appreciably when over the shop, in gold letters, appeared the name of Sarah Winch.  It might be the countess’s maiden name, if she really was a married countess.

But, in truth, the better informed of the town, having begun to think its Croesus capable of any eccentricity, chose to believe.  They were at the pitch of excitement which demands and will swallow a succession of wilder extravagances.  To accelerate the delirium of the fun, nothing was too much, because any absurdity was anticipated.  And the earl’s readiness to be complimented on the shop’s particular merits, his gratified air at an allusion to it, whirled the fun faster.  He seemed entirely unconscious that each step he now took wakened peals.

For such is the fate of a man who has come to be dogged by the humourist for the provision he furnishes; and, as it happens, he is the more laughable if not in himself a laughable object.  The earl’s handsome figure, fine style, and contrasting sobriety heightened the burlesque of his call to admiration of a shop where Whitechapel would sit in state-according to the fiction so closely under the lee of fact that they were not strictly divisible.  Moreover, Sarah Winch, whom Chumley Potts drew into conversation, said, he vowed, she came up West from Whitechapel.  She said it a little nervously, but without blushing.  Always on the side of the joke, he could ask:  ‘Who can doubt?’ Indeed, scepticism poisoned the sport.