Page:A Child of the Jago - Arthur Morrison.djvu/42

 intervals. Within sat many friends and relations of the shopmen and superior mechanics, and waited for the Bishop, the Eminences of the Elevation Mission sitting apart on the platform. Without, among the idlers, waited Dicky Perrott. His notions of what was going on were indistinct; but he had a belief, imbibed through rumour and tradition, that all celebrations at such large buildings were accompanied by the consumption, in the innermost recesses, of cake and tea. Even to be near cake was something. In Shoreditch High Street was a shop where cake stood in the window in great slabs, one slab over another, to an incalculable value. At this window—against it, as near as possible, his face flattened white—Dickey would stand till the shop-keeper drove him off; till he had but to shut his eyes to see once more, in the shifting black, the rich yellow sections with their myriad raisins. Once a careless errand boy, who had bought a