out of its mind and into

the Gazette. For, what would staid British responsibility and

Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics

respectability have said to orange-trees in boxes in a Bank courtyard,

and even to a Cupid over the counter? Yet such things were.

Tellson’s had whitewashed the Cupid, but he was still to be seen

on the ceiling, in the coolest linen, aiming (as he very often does)

at money from morning to night. Bankruptcy must inevitably have

come of this young Pagan, in Lombard-street, London, and also of

a curtained alcove in the rear of the immortal boy, and also of a

looking-glass let into the wall, and also of clerks not at all old, who

danced in public on the slightest provocation. Yet, a French

Tellson’s could get on with these things exceedingly well, and, as

long as the times held together, no man had taken fright at them,

and drawn out his money.

What money would be drawn out of Tellson’s henceforth, and

what would lie there, lost and forgotten; what plate and jewels

would tarnish in Tellson’s hiding-places, while the depositors

rusted in prisons, and when they should have violently perished;

how many accounts with Tellson’s never to be balanced in this

world, must be carried over into the next; no man could have said,

that night, any more than Mr. Jarvis Lorry could, though he

thought heavily of these questions