Mr. Bovington was about to hazard a remark about abattoirs, when deafening cries again arose in the street. “Mad bull! mad bull! mad bull!” resounded from Smithfield-bars. “Mad bull! mad bull!” was echoed from the uttermost ends of St. John Street. Bovington looked out of window. A fine black ox was tearing furiously along the pavement. Women were screaming and rushing into shops, children scrambling out of the road, men hiding themselves in doorways, boys in ecstacies of rapture, drovers as mad as the bull tearing after him, sheep getting under the wheels of hackney-coaches, dogs half choking themselves with worrying the wool off their backs, pigs obstinately connecting themselves with a hearse and funeral, other oxen looking into public-houses—everybody and everything disorganised, no sort of animal able to go where it wanted or was wanted; nothing in its right place; everything wrong everywhere; all the town in a brain fever because of this infernal market! The mad bull was Mr. Bovington’s West Highlander. He was quite prepared for it. When he saw him going round the corner, and at the same moment beheld a nursemaid, a baby, and a baked potato-can, fly into the air in opposite directions, he was horrified, but not surprised. He followed his West Highlander. He followed the crowd tearing after his West Highlander, down St. John Street, through Jerusalem-passage, along Clerkenwell Green, up a hill, and down an alley. He passed two disabled apple-women, a fractured shop-front, an old man being put into a cab and taken to the hospital. At last, he traced the favourite of his herds into a back parlour in Liquorpond Street, into which he had violently intruded through a tripe-shop, and where he was being slaughtered for his own peace and for the safety of the neighbourhood; but not at all to the satisfaction of an invalid who had leaped out of a turn-up bedstead, into the little yard behind. The carcass of the West Highlander was sold to a butcher for a sum which paid about half of what was demanded, from its owner, for compensation to the different victims of its fury. Mr. Bovington returned to Long Hornets a ‘wiser,’ though certainly not—commercially speaking—a ‘better’ man. His adventures in Smithfield had made a large hole in a 50_l._ note. Some of his oxen were returned unsold. Two came back with the ‘foot disease’, and the rest did not recover their value for six months. Mr. Bovington has never tried Smithfield again. He regards it as a place accursed. In distant Reigns, he says, it was an odious spot, associated with cruelty, fanaticism, wickedness and torture; and in these later days it is worthy of its ancient reputation. It is a doomed, but a proper and consistent stronghold (according to Mr. Bovington) of prejudice, ignorance, cupidity, and stupidity:—