Great Porter Square: A Mystery. v. 3Farjeon, B. L. (Benjamin Leopold)
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Great Porter Square: A Mystery. v. 3
Farjeon, B. L. (Benjamin Leopold)
Detective and mystery stories; Fiction
In our yesterday's issues we gave the full particulars of that fire.
No one was injured except the two wretched beings who met their just
and awful fate in the grave they had prepared for themselves. They
have passed away from this world, but it will be long before the
memory of their crime and its involvements will be forgotten. It has
been determined to pull down the fatal house in which the murder was
committed, and to rebuild it anew. The house next to it, No. 118,
occupied by Mrs. Preedy, lodging-house keeper, received some damage
from the fire; but Mrs. Preedy is fully insured, and her loss will be
a gain to her--a paradox, but strictly accurate, for the murder in the
adjoining house had brought hers into disrepute, and her business was
languishing. It will revive now that the fire has burnt out the terror
of the crime; and the worthy Mrs. Preedy may congratulate herself
upon having gained friends in the persons of Mr. Frederick Holdfast
and the intrepid, noble-hearted lady who will shortly bear his name.
In Mrs. Preedy's house lived an old bedridden lady, Mrs. Bailey,
whose life was with some difficulty saved. She herself placed serious
obstacles in the way of her preservation, screaming out when they
attempted to remove her from her bed. She clung to this household god
with such tenacity that there was nothing for it but to humour the old
lady, and to remove it with her. As they carried it down stairs, the
covering was by an accident ripped, and there rolled out of it between
thirty and forty sovereigns, which Mrs. Bailey had hoarded up since the
death of her husband, an event which occurred Heaven knows how many
years ago. The distress of the old lady was extreme, but the gold was
picked up and returned to its owner, minus a few sovereigns, which
somehow had stuck to the fingers of the searchers. She is, however,
no loser by the accident, as Mr. Frederick Holdfast made good the
deficiency. It is satisfactory to learn that a cherished tradition
current in Great Porter Square, that the old lady's mattress was stuffed
with gold, was verified by the ripping of the sacking. Mrs. Bailey will
no doubt find another safe for her treasure in the future. The bedridden
old lady sustained a loss in the burning of a linnet without a note to
its voice, and a very old bull-finch, whose cage hung at the foot of her
bed--a sacrifice of life, in addition to the more terrible sacrifice of
two human beings, which we were almost forgetting to mention.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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