Book the Fifth, the Dumb Detective.

Chapter 1 The Count of Moral at Home

The denizens of Friar Street and such localities, being in the habit of waking in the morning

to the odor of melted tallow and boiling soap, and of going to sleep at night with the

smell of burning bones under their noses, can of course have nothing of an external nature

and common with the inhabitants of Park Lane and its vicinity.

For the gratification of whose old factory nerves, exotics, lives short and unnatural

lives, on staircases, in budwars, and in the conservatories of rich plate glass and

fairy architecture, where perfumed waters play in gilded fountains through the long summer

days.

It might be imagined, then, that the common griefs and vulgar sorrows, such as hopeless love

and torturing jealousy, sickness or death or madness or despair, would be also banished

from the regions of Park Lane, and entirely confined to Friar Street.

Any person with a proper sense of the fitness of things would of course conclude this to

be the case, and would assume picture my lady the Duchess of Mayfair, dining on red

herrings and potatoes at the absurd hour of one o'clock p.m., or black-leading her own

great with her own alabaster fingers, as weeping over the death of her child, or breaking

her heart for her faithless husband, just like Mrs. Stiggins, potato and coal merchant

on a small scale, or Mrs. Higgins, whose sole revenues come from Mangland unhere.

And it does seem hard, oh my brethren, that there should be any limit to the magic power

of gold.

It may exclude bad-airs, foul-sense, ugly sights and jarring sounds.

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