The elder Miss Rumbold--the parents were out of town--was not idle in the mean time. She packed all the little R.’s off to bed--(I did not see them have any supper)--and then, having got rid of the family branches, began on the tin ones. She had fixed her head quarters in the drawing-room, from whence I saw Caroline and Henry detached, with separate parcels of tins and candles, to do the same office for the floors above and below. But no such luck! After a while, the street door gently opened, and forth sneaked the two deserters, of course to see better illuminations than their own. At the slam of the door behind them Miss Rumbold comprehended the full calamity: first, she threw up her arms, then her eyes, then clenched her teeth and then her hands; going through all the pantomime for distress of mind--but she had no time for grieving, and indeed but little for rejoicing. Mr. Wix’s was beginning to glitter. Tearing up and down stairs like a lamplighter on his ladder, she furnished all the blank windows, and then returned to the drawing-room; and what was evidently her favourite fancy, she had completed and hung up two festoons of artificial flowers; but alas! her stock on hand fell short a whole foot of the third window--I am afraid for want of the very bouquet in Caroline’s bonnet. Removing the unfortunate garlands, she rushed out full speed, and the next moment I saw her in the story above, rapidly unpapering her curls, and making herself as fit as time allowed, to sit in state in the drawing-room, by the light of twenty-seven long sixes. [Illustration: ALL AT SIXES AND SEVENS.] A violent uproar now recalled my attention to Number 29, where the mob had begun to call out to Miss Winter for her Northern Lights. Miss W. was at her post, and rushed with her rush to comply with the demand; but a sudden twitter of nervousness aggravating her old palsy, she could not persuade her wavering taper to alight on any one of the cottons. There was a deal of coquetting indeed between wick and wick, but nothing like a mutual flame. In vain the thin lover-like candle kept hovering over its intended, and shedding tears of grease at every repulse; not a glimmer replied to its glance, till at last, weary of love and light, it fairly leaped out of its tin socket, and drowned its own twinkle in a tall jelly-glass. The patience of the mob, already of a thin texture, was torn to rags by this conclusion; they saw that if she would, Miss Winter never _could_ illuminate: but as this was an unwelcome truth, they broke it to her with a volley of stones that destroyed her little Vauxhall in a moment, and in a twinkle left her nothing to twinkle with!