I found Lady Anne Mowbray--talked nonsense to her ladyship for a quarter of an hour--and at last, _à propos _to her perfumed fan, I brought in the old muff with the horrid smell, on purpose to obtain a full description of it. She told me that it was a gray fox-skin, lined with scarlet; that it had great pompadour-coloured knots at each end, and that it was altogether hideous. Lady Anne declared that she was heartily glad it would never shock her eyes more. It was now just nine o’clock; people then kept better hours than they do at present; I was afraid that all the shops would be shut; but I recollected that pawnbrokers’ shops were usually kept open late. I lost no time in pursuing my object. I took a hackney coach, bribed the coachman to drive very fast to Mr. Manessa--found Manessa and Jacob going to bed sleepy--but at sight of me Jacob was alert in an instant, and joyfully ready to go with me immediately to Baxter, the pawnbroker’s. I made Jacob furnish me with an old surtout and slouched hat, desiring to look as shabby as possible, that the pawnbroker might take me for one of his usual nightly customers, and might not be alarmed at the sight of a gentleman. “That won’t do yet, Mr. Harrington,” said Jacob, when I had equipped myself in the old hat and coat. “Mr. Baxter will see the look of a gentleman through all that. It is not the shabby coat that will make the gentleman look shabby, no more than the fine coat can ever make _the shabby_ look like the gentleman. The pawnbroker, who is used to observe and find out all manner of people, will know that as well as I--but now you shall see how well at one stroke I will disguise the gentleman.” Jacob then twisted a dirty silk handkerchief round my throat, and this did the business so completely, that I defied the pawnbroker and all his penetration. We drove as fast as we could to Swallow-street--dismissed our hackney coach, and walked up to the pawnbroker’s. Light in the shop!--all alive!--and business going on. The shop was so full of people, that we stood for some minutes unnoticed. We had leisure to look about us, as we had previously agreed to do, for Lady De Brantefield’s muff. I had a suspicion that, notwithstanding the veneration with which it had been said to be treated, it might have come to the common lot of cast clothes. Jacob at one side, and I at the other, took a careful survey of the multifarious contents of the shop; of all that hung from the ceiling; and all that was piled on the shelves; and all that lay huddled in corners, or crammed into dark recesses. In one of the darkest and most ignominious of these, beneath a heap of sailors’ old jackets and trowsers, I espied a knot of pompadour riband. I hooked it out a little with the stick I had in my hand; but Jacob stopped me, and called to the shopboy, who now had his eye upon us, and with him we began to bargain hard for some of the old clothes that lay upon the muff.