He bent his steps towards the house of the undertaker in Globe Lane; and, knocking him up, obtained admittance and a bed.
When he awoke from a sound sleep, into which sheer fatigue plunged him in spite of the unpleasant nature of his thoughts, it was broad-day-light.
He immediately rose and despatched one of Banks's boys for the morning newspaper; and from its columns he learnt the fate of the Honourable Gilbert Vernon.
"Better so than that he should have remained alive perhaps to repent, as these sentimental humbugs in high life usually do, and then blab against me," murmured Tidkins to himself. "The whole business at the Hall is evidently wrapped in considerable mystery; and there I hope it will remain. But now let me devote myself heart and soul to my search after that scoundrel Crankey Jem."
CHAPTER CCXL.
A NEW EPOCH.
Twenty months had elapsed since the events just related.
It was now the end of January, 1843.
Haply the reader may begin to imagine that our subject is well-nigh exhausted—that the mysteries of London are nearly all unveiled?
He errs; for London is a city containing such a variety of strange institutions, private as well as public, and presenting so many remarkable phases to the contemplation of the acute observer, that the writer who is resolved to avail himself fully of the heterogeneous materials thus supplied him, cannot readily lack food for comment and narrative.
The dwellers in the country, and even the inhabitants of the great provincial cities and manufacturing towns, can form no just estimate of the wondrous features of the sovereign metropolis by the local scenes with which they are familiar.