s. One woman fainted, but she was held
upright by the press, and as no one paid the slightest attention to her
she rapidly came to. Then at length a tall gentleman in a beautiful
frock-coat was seen to be expostulating sternly with the seventh
pair of golden commissionaires; the recalcitant doors flew open,
and the beautiful frock-coat was hurled violently against a marble
pillar for its pains. Just as the seventh regiment was disappearing to
join in the sack and loot, a young and pretty girl drove up in a hansom,
threw the driver a shilling (which the driver contemplated with a scorn
too deep for words), and joined the tail of the regiment.

'I knew I should do it,' she said to herself, 'and Alb said I
shouldn't.'

In another moment Hugo's was a raging sea of petticoats. In half an hour
the doors had to be shut and locked, and new crowds formed on the
tessellated pavements; Hugo's was full.

Hugo's was full!

For three days past Hugo had bought whole pages of every daily paper in
London, in order to break gently to the public the tremendous fact that
his annual sale would commence on New Year's Day, and the still more
tremendous fact that it would close on the third of January. There are
only three genuine annual sales in the Metropolis. One is Hugo's,
another happens in Tottenham Court Road, and the third--but why disclose
the situation of the third, since all persons from Putney to Peckham
Rise who are worthy to know it, know it? Hugo's was naturally the
greatest, the largest, the most exciting, the most marvellous, the most
powerful in its appeal to the most powerful of human instincts--the
instinct to get half a crown's worth of value for two shillings. In
earlier years Hugo had made his annual sale prodigious and incredible,
with no thought of profit, merely for the pleasure of the affair. But he
found that the more he offered to the public the more he received from
them, and that it was practically impossible to lose money by giving
things away. This is, of course, a fundamental axiom of commerce. And
now Hugo's annual sale was to be more astonishing than ever; some said
that he meant at any cost to efface the memory of those discreditable
incidents before mentioned. Decidedly, many of the advertised bargains
were remarkable in the highest degree. There was, for example, the 'fine
silvered fox-stole, with real brush at each end,' at a guinea. Every
woman who can tell a silvered fox-stole from a cock's-feathe