The inhabitants of the Cooperage were rejoicing in the light and warmth. The cripple had brought out a rocking-chair, with its cane seat patched up with string, and was swinging himself with half-shut eyes in front of the little row of flowers which assiduous watering had kept alive during the summer drouth. A new canary in the mended cage of its predecessor chirruped gaily from the open window of one of the tiny row of cottages; the window of another revealed a trophy of travel, a box bearing on its lid a photograph of Southend Pier, framed in polished mussel-shells, which its owner, with an altruism not often found in the denizens of lordlier neighbourhoods, had disposed so that its beauty could be enjoyed by the passer-by at the expense of the inmates of the house themselves. Over the whole of the Cooperage there was an atmosphere of freshness and content. The little gates and palings on the window-sills were newly painted in artistic green and white. Many of them now revealed their inner utility by guarding pots of musk or mignonette, with here and there a bright red geranium. The pavement of the yard was clean beyond its former wont, and the refuse heap that had once marked the abode of Mike Finigan had disappeared. It was over Mike Finigan’s house that the greatest change of all had come. Not a single broken window was any longer to be seen in the front of the dwelling. The door had been painted green to match the five-barred gates, and decorated with a handsome old brass knocker that shone like an imitation sun. The window of the ground-floor was open, and through it could be seen a perfectly æsthetic kitchen--a kitchen after the heart of South Kensington, with a high-backed settle, a Cromwellian table and armchairs, all of the finest black oak, a dresser lined with willow-pattern plates of deepest blue, and a mantelshelf glorious with copper saucepans scoured to the grain. The transformation had extended to, or rather it had begun with, the inhabitants of the regenerated hovel. The bewildered dwellers in the Cooperage dated their present era of peacefulness and brightness from the appearance of a remarkable announcement in the _Times_: “On Monday, the 14th instant, at the registry office, Lambeth, Lord Alistair Fingal Stuart Campbell-Stuart, brother of the Duke of Trent and Colonsay, to Miss Molly Finucane, daughter of the late Jeremiah Finucane, of Beers Cooperage, Lambeth, S. W.” Following on the step thus disclosed to the world Lord and Lady Alistair had taken up their residence in what might have been described with truthfulness as the home of her ladyship’s family, vacated beforehand by her brother.