mes_ began with something about Celtic disturbances of the
equilibrium of Empire, and the _Daily Express_ distinguished itself
splendidly by omitting altogether so controversial a matter and
substituting a leader about goloshes.

And the morning after that, the editors and the newspapers were in such
a state, that, as the phrase is, there was no holding them. Whatever
secret and elvish thing it is that broods over editors and suddenly
turns their brains, that thing had seized on the story of the broken
glass and the duel in the garden. It became monstrous and omnipresent,
as do in our time the unimportant doings of the sect of the
Agapemonites, or as did at an earlier time the dreary dishonesties
of the Rhodesian financiers. Questions were asked about it, and even
answered, in the House of Commons. The Government was solemnly denounced
in the papers for not having done something, nobody knew what, to
prevent the window being broken. An enormous subscription was started
to reimburse Mr. Gordon, the man who had been gagged in the shop. Mr.
MacIan, one of the combatants, became for some mysterious reason, singly
and hugely popular as a comic figure in the comic papers and on the
stage of the music hall. He was always represented (in defiance of
fact), with red whiskers, and a very red nose, and in full Highland
costume. And a song, consisting of an unimaginable number of verses,
in which his name was rhymed with flat iron, the British Lion, sly 'un,
dandelion, Spion (With Kop in the next line), was sung to crowded houses
every night. The papers developed a devouring thirst for the capture of
the fugitives; and when they had not been caught for forty-eight hours,
they suddenly turned the whole matter into a detective mystery. Letters
under the heading, "Where are They," poured in to every paper, with
every conceivable kind of explanation, running them to earth in the
Monument, the Twopenny Tube, Epping Forest, Westminster Abbey, rolled up
in carpets at Shoolbreds, locked up in safes in Chancery Lane. Yes, the
papers were very interesting, and Mr. Turnbull unrolled a whole bundle
of them for the amusement of Mr. MacIan as they sat on a high common to
the north of London, in the coming of the white dawn.

The darkness in the east had been broken with a bar of grey; the bar
of grey was split with a sword of silver and morning lifted itself
laboriously over London. From the spot where Turnbull and MacIan were
sitting on one of