ess.

"Oh yes, jujubes--Gregory powder--magnesia. The danger is imminent. In
all this matter I have felt that I fought not merely for my own city
(though to that I owe all my blood), but for all places in which these
great ideas could prevail. I am fighting not merely for Notting Hill,
but for Bayswater itself; for North Kensington itself. For if the
gold-hunters prevail, these also will lose all their ancient
sentiments and all the mystery of their national soul. I know I can
count upon you."

"Oh yes, sir," said the chemist, with great animation; "we are always
glad to oblige a good customer."

Adam Wayne went out of the shop with a deep sense of fulfilment of
soul.

"It is so fortunate," he said, "to have tact, to be able to play upon
the peculiar talents and specialities, the cosmopolitanism of the
grocer and the world-old necromancy of the chemist. Where should I be
without tact?"

CHAPTER II--_The Remarkable Mr. Turnbull_

After two more interviews with shopmen, however, the patriot's
confidence in his own psychological diplomacy began vaguely to wane.
Despite the care with which he considered the peculiar rationale and
the peculiar glory of each separate shop, there seemed to be something
unresponsive about the shopmen. Whether it was a dark resentment
against the uninitiate for peeping into their masonic magnificence, he
could not quite conjecture.

His conversation with the man who kept the shop of curiosities had
begun encouragingly. The man who kept the shop of curiosities had,
indeed, enchanted him with a phrase. He was standing drearily at the
door of his shop, a wrinkled man with a grey pointed beard, evidently
a gentleman who had come down in the world.

"And how does your commerce go, you strange guardian of the past?"
said Wayne, affably.

"Well, sir, not very well," replied the man, with that patient voice
of his class which is one of the most heart-breaking things in the
world. "Things are terribly quiet."

Wayne's eyes shone suddenly.

"A great saying," he said, "worthy of a man whose merchandise is human
history. Terribly quiet; that is in two words the spirit of this age,
as I have felt it from my cradle. I sometimes wondered how many other
people felt the oppression of this union between quietude and terror.
I see blank well-ordered streets and men in black moving about
inoffensively, sullenly. It goes on day after day, day after day, and
nothing happens; but to me it is li