Number Three, a pretty house smothered in clematis in the proper season of the year, with its white window sashes and its sober red front, was the town house of Mr. Cunningham, who, apparently, had no initial and no Christian name. He was known to his intimate friends as Mush, the derivation of which is a little obscure. Mr. Cunningham described himself as independent, which meant no more than that he was independent of the ordinary necessities of making an honest living. In a sense, he was by far the best known of the Colony, for Mush had served two terms of penal servitude, one in an English and one in a French prison. He had the reputation of being able to cut holes in steel safes with a greater rapidity than any other gentleman in his profession, and it is said, probably with truth, that he had improved upon the oxy-hydrogen jet and had introduced a new element which shortened the work by half. The tenant of Number Five was a gentleman, benign of countenance and very good to the poor. He was called the Bishop by friends and foes alike. His real name was Brown and he had been concerned in more bank swindles than any of the other colonists, though he had only one conviction to his discredit and that a comparative flea-bite of nine months’ hard labour. The owner of Number Seven was described as “Mr. Colling Jacques, Civil Engineer,” in the local directories. The official police “Who’s Who” noted that he was a wonderful pistol shot, and recorded, in parenthesis, that on the occasion of his arrest in connection with the smashing of the Bank of Holland, no weapon was found upon him. It was also added that there was no conviction against him in England, though he, too, had seen the inside of a French prison. Number Nine was pointed out to sightseers, with a certain amount of local pride by the guide, as the home of Millet the forger, who had received on one occasion a fifteen years’ sentence, but had been released after serving two years, an act of grace on the part of the authorities which earned for him a certain unpopularity with his peers and was held to be not unconnected with the subsequent arrest of a few of his former associates, the suggestion being that Mr. Millet had turned King’s evidence. At Number Two, on the “oval” side of the street, lived H. Mulberry, a respectable and methodical man, who went to his little office in Chancery Lane every morning of his life by the 9:15 and returned to his home at exactly 5:30 P.M. year in and year out. Mulberry was a begging letter writer on a magnificent scale. He had a wonderful literary style which seldom failed to extract the necessary emolument which he sought.