“_’Ere_, ’ere!” repeated the small shoemaker, indignantly. “I dare say it is as good as the place he came from. He might look in and see what he thinks of it.” “That’s a place you might tell us a little about, now,” the fat man suggested, as if he had been waiting for his chance. Before the shoemaker had time to notice this challenge some one inquired, with a hoarse petulance, who the blazes they were talking about; and Mr Schinkel took upon himself to reply that they were talking about a man who hadn’t done what he had done by simply exchanging abstract ideas, however valuable, with his friends in a respectable pot-house. “What the devil has he done, then?” some one else demanded; and Muniment replied, quietly, that he had spent twelve years in a Prussian prison, and was consequently still an object of a good deal of interest to the police. “Well, if you call that very useful, I must say I prefer a pot-house!” cried the shoemaker, appealing to all the company and looking, as it appeared to Hyacinth, particularly hideous. “_Doch, doch_, it is useful,” the German remarked, philosophically, among his yellow clouds. “Do you mean to say you are not prepared for that, yourself?” Muniment inquired of the shoemaker. “Prepared for that? I thought we were going to smash that sort of shop altogether; I thought that was the main part of the job.” “They will smash best, those who have been inside,” the German declared; “unless, perhaps, they are broken, enervated. But Hoffendahl is not enervated.” “Ah, no; no smashing, no smashing,” Muniment went on. “We want to keep them standing, and even to build a few more; but the difference will be that we shall put the correct sort in.” “I take your idea—that Griffin is one of the correct sort,” the fat man remarked, indicating the shoemaker.