While her ladyship was thus occupied, the townspeople of Arden, impatient to display the returning tide of their affection and respect towards their young landlord, were illuminating every pane of glass they possessed, and lighting bonfires on every rising ground in the neighbourhood, in honour of his acquittal; while at the same time their indignation against Geoffery knew no bounds. His motive in suppressing and concealing Alfred's letter spoke for itself; and so strong was the general feeling of abhorrence which it excited, that the night after he was buried, his body was disinterred by the mob, and placed on a gibbet on the road-side, between Arden and Arden Park. His coadjutor, too, Mr. Fips, was blamed even more than he deserved, if that indeed were possible: that is to say, he was universally believed to have been a party to the suppression of Willoughby's packet; a belief engendered, and, in a great measure justified, by his being Geoffery's right-hand man on all occasions, and still more by the active part he had taken previously to and on the trial, as well as by his own general villany of character. Accordingly, during the illuminations for Alfred's acquittal, the mob began by smashing every window in Fips's house; and hatred of Gripe, as he was called, being a common cause, those who had commenced the attack were soon joined by so many who had a personal feeling of revenge, founded on a lively remembrance of ruin entailed on themselves and their families by his means, that before morning they literally left not one stone, or rather one brick, upon another of Fips's dwelling; while himself and his daughter narrowly escaped with their lives, without being able to carry with them a single paper, or a vestige of property of any kind. What was of value found plenty of customers, who thought it no robbery to take back a little of their own; and as to the parchments, &c., a sagacious ringleader proposed that they should all be emptied out at the foot of the market cross; that so, when there was light in the morning, every one might come and choose his own. Thus did many a man get back his documents without being compelled to pay the unjust and enormous bill for which they were held as security; whilst every thing in the shape of bill, book, or account standing against any individual, was carefully consigned to the flames. All the town, in short, felt it more or less a blessing that the hornet's nest had been destroyed. As to the authorities, they had themselves, some of them, felt the gripe of Mr. Fips in their day: after, therefore, every step _they_ judged proper was duly taken to discover who had been the perpetrators of the late riots, it was decided, at a public meeting held for the purpose--"That the very _unjustifiable_ outrages which had been committed on the night of the -- of ----, 18--, could not be _brought home to any particular individuals_." CHAPTER XXI.