any other directions I can give before I leave, respecting what
you would wish to be done?'

When Physician, after discharging himself of his trust up-stairs,
rejoined Bar in the street, he said no more of his interview with Mrs
Merdle than that he had not yet told her all, but that what he had told
her she had borne pretty well. Bar had devoted his leisure in the street
to the construction of a most ingenious man-trap for catching the whole
of his jury at a blow; having got that matter settled in his mind,
it was lucid on the late catastrophe, and they walked home slowly,
discussing it in every bearing. Before parting at the Physician's door,
they both looked up at the sunny morning sky, into which the smoke of a
few early fires and the breath and voices of a few early stirrers were
peacefully rising, and then looked round upon the immense city, and
said, if all those hundreds and thousands of beggared people who were
yet asleep could only know, as they two spoke, the ruin that impended
over them, what a fearful cry against one miserable soul would go up to
Heaven!

The report that the great man was dead, got about with astonishing
rapidity. At first, he was dead of all the diseases that ever were
known, and of several bran-new maladies invented with the speed of
Light to meet the demand of the occasion. He had concealed a dropsy from
infancy, he had inherited a large estate of water on the chest from his
grandfather, he had had an operation performed upon him every morning
of his life for eighteen years, he had been subject to the explosion of
important veins in his body after the manner of fireworks, he had had
something the matter with his lungs, he had had something the matter
with his heart, he had had something the matter with his brain. Five
hundred people who sat down to breakfast entirely uninformed on the
whole subject, believed before they had done breakfast, that they
privately and personally knew Physician to have said to Mr Merdle, 'You
must expect to go out, some day, like the snuff of a candle;' and that
they knew Mr Merdle to have said to Physician, 'A man can die but once.'
By about eleven o'clock in the forenoon, something the matter with the
brain, became the favourite theory against the field; and by twelve the
something had been distinctly ascertained to be 'Pressure.'

Pressure was so entirely satisfactory to the public mind, and seemed to
make everybody so comfortable, that it might have last