"I make them a dozen! There are fourteen companies in all; the First is downriver; twelve are there on Tower Hill; one, as is customary, standeth watch over the Tower. Of those, how many are out on the Wharf? Have you tallied them yet? No, never mind, ye’ll be assembling a certain Device...where is my damned bagpiper? Ah, now I see him, strolling on Water Lane...why, I phant’sy I can even hear his Heathenish Strains. Too bad for the Lieutenant! Now, where’s my Fire?" He twitched the glass hard to port, sweeping it across the whole expanse of the Tower. The northern wall and the moat flashed by, and then the stretch of Tower Hill that lay due north of the complex. This was but a narrow patch of open ground, for the city stretched out a lobe toward the Tower here, nearly pinching the Tower Hill green in half. At its closest approach, some of the buildings along Postern Row came within a stone’s throw of the Moat. These belonged not to the city of London but to the Tower of London itself; they were called the Tower hamlets, they had their own militia, their own Justices of the Peace, and their own Fire Brigade. Which was not merely a pedantic observation. For one of the buildings in the Tower Hamlets was on fire. The trail of smoke above it told that it had been smouldering for a long time; but just now, orange flames began to billow from its windows. The Fire Brigade had been called out from the taverns where they patiently waited, day in and day out, for an excuse to do their duty, and they were hastening out of the hamlets’ diverse courts and culs-de-sac, out of Distiller’s Yard and Savage Gardens into Woodruff Lane. But they were outnumbered, and generally out-run, by persons who merely wanted to see a building burn down. This was the ever-present Mobility; or, for short, the Mobb.