The Londoners by Robert Hichens

As the rabbit, in moments of danger, has a passion for the little hole into which it darts with the speed of lightning, so, in moments both of safety and danger, has the properly-constituted Englishman a passion for "the home. " Even the most middle-class owner of a tiny semi-detached "villa residence," looking out over a network of railway, is prepared to defend it and its clothes-line, and that mysterious barrel which always stands on end at its back-door, with his heart's best blood. Now, this is very creditable. But even a very beautiful and noble instinct may be carried too far. And the Englishman's passion for the home was, in the Bun Emperor's case, carried very far indeed.

Mr. Lite was a remarkable man in many subtle ways. Of course he had risen from the gutter. Everybody does do that nowadays. There is nothing original in the feat. His gutter was an exceedingly small, and exceedingly dingy, pie-shop in Camberwell, the sort of miscellaneous pie-shop which exhibits to the street a terrace on which things of meat and things of jam, the saveloy and the marmalade puff, air themselves side by side in a fly-blown amity of meek endurance. And it was this fact which had eventually obtained for worthy Mrs. Lite, who had assisted in the shop, the sobriquet of "the raised pie," a title suitable to her changed social condition.