The Mysteries of the Court of London — page 156: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

CHAPTER XV THE BARONET AND THE HANGMAN On the following day, between two and three o’clock in the afternoon, Mr. Daniel Coffin was sitting on the step of his shop door, smoking a long pipe, and conversing with a neighbour who was doing precisely the same on the opposite side of Fleet Lane. Jack the Foundling was in his own room, reading the history of Dick Turpin; Sally Melmoth was attending to her household duties; and Dick had gone out to pass an hour or two at some skittle-ground. Mr. Coffin was therefore ‘‘ minding the shop,’’ although he had very few customers at that time of the day, and would much rather have been without them altogether, the shop being, as we have before informed our readers, a mere “‘ blind ”’ to serve as an ostensible source of income in addition to his official gains and perquisites as hangman. What the conversation was about which he was carrying on with his neighbour we do not propose to describe; suffice it to say that it was all of a sudden cut short by an ejaculation of mingled astonishment and alarm on the part of Daniel Coffin, as he beheld Sir Douglas Huntingdon ascending the lane. The reader will not fail to comprehend how it was that the Hangman’s equanimity was disturbed for a moment on be- holding the baronet; for there was not only the adventure at Shooter’s Hill in which Mr. Coffin was implicated, but there was likewise the grave episode of the fire, and far more serious still, there was the murder of Nell Gibson. But the Hangman possessed, as we have frequently shown, a won- drous amount of presence of mind; and no sooner were his apprehensions conceived than by a rapid chain of reasoning he set them at rest once more. 135 CoOnniclooolks (C(O)