But Gosling’s, as I knew it, is gone. Gosling’s I have always identified with Tellson’s in “A Tale of Two Cities.” “It was very small, very dark, very ugly, very incommodious. . . . After bursting open a door of idiotic obstinacity with a weak rattle in its throat, you fell into Tellson’s down two steps, and came to your senses in a miserable little shop, with two little counters where the oldest of men made your cheque shake as if the wind rustled it while they examined the signature by the dingiest of windows, which were always under a shower-bath of mud from Fleet Street.” The description exactly fits Gosling’s before it got itself a new façade and became the mere branch of a bigger bank. And the Dickens Fellowship should have looked to it, and preserved for the nation this memorial of the master. Close by was a shop for the sale of mechanical toys, in the window of which a steamer laboured heavily in a sou’-westerly gale, the rolling waves kept in a state of agitation by clockwork, and the whole effect being particularly real and naturalistic. The proprietor of this scientific toy-shop was eventually attacked by the virus that runs through Fleet Street. He became a newspaper proprietor, and a successful one. His translation happened in this way: Young Kenealy, son of the eminent but erratic counsel for the Claimant, founded a paper called _Modern Society_. His pious object was to rehabilitate his late father, and this could only be accomplished by reopening the whole of the dreary Tichborne case, of which the public was heartily sick. The paper did not pay, and it was eventually acquired, as a property, by the owner of the clockwork ocean. He, worthy man, had no axe to grind. He retained the services of a pliant editor, and made the organ a vehicle for that sort of gossip which goes down so well with suburban matrons. The paper went up by leaps and bounds. The new proprietor gave himself airs, dressed the part, exhibited himself in the Park, and in a brief period had managed to shed all traces of the obsequious Fleet Street tradesman. He crossed the bar years since—perhaps in his mechanical steamer—but his paper persists to this day.