Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/288

278[February 20, 1869] to my thinking, only met in his decadence with his deserts. When I spoke of "carcases" just now, I did not intend to imply that Danks was a wholesale butcher. His carcases were of bricks and mortar, and of his own making. Danks was a builder. He took the contract once for the Doleful-hill Lunatic Asylum, by which he did so well—notwithstanding the complaints of the architect in respect to the bricks—that he was enabled to build a large number of semi-detached villas, and a still larger quantity of "carcases," as a speculation of his own. Had he been prudent—had common sense or even common decency been his guides—he might have made a fortune, and be living at this day in his own house at South Kensington, six storeys high, and with a belvedere at one end, like the Eddystone lighthouse. His wife might have had a box at the opera in lieu of that sad witness-box at the Divorce Court, and his sons might be enjoying a college education instead of being (as I know is the case with Tom) a waiter at a chop house in Pope's Head Alley, or suffering every kind of hardship and privation (which I am afraid is Phil's mournful lot) as cabin boy to that well-known disciplinarian, Captain Roper, of the ship Anne and Sarah Cobbum of Great Grimsby. This misguided Danks might have become rich, respected, and a member of the Metropolitan Board of Works. Instead of this flying in the face of his reason and experience, of which he should have had a fair share, seeing that he weighed nearly seventeen stone—he went and built Wretchedville. And then, forsooth, the man wondered that he was ruined.

The ground, to begin with, was the very worst in the whole county. It was an ugly, polygonal plot, shelving down from the higher road that leads from Sobbington to Doleful-hill: a clay soil, of course, but in very bad repute for the making of bricks. Indeed the clay did not seem to be fit for anything, save to stick to the boot soles of people who were incautious enough to walk over it. When any rain fell, it remained here for about seven days after the adjoining ground had dried up. Then the clay resolved itself into a solution of a dark red colour, and the spot assumed the aspect of a field of gore. When it was not clayey it was marshy; and the neighbours had long since christened the place "Ague Hole." Danks in his frenzy, and with the Vale of Health at Hampstead in his eye, wanted to call it "Pleasant Hollow;" but the ground landlord, or rather landlady, Miss Goole (she went melancholy mad, left half her fortune to the Doleful-hill Asylum, and the will is still the subject of a nice little litigation in chancery)—Miss Goole, I say, who granted Danks his building lease, insisted that the group of tenements he intended to erect should be called Wretchedville. Her aunt had been a Miss Wretched, of Ashby-de-la-Zouch.

And Wretchedville the place remains to this day. Danks did his best, or rather his worst with it. He proposed to drain the ground, the result of which was, that water made its appearance in places where it had not appeared before. He laid out a declivitous road branching downwards from the highway, and leading nowhere save to the reservoir of the West Howlington Gasworks; and a nice terminus to the vista did this monstrous iron tub make. He spent all his own money, and as much of other people's as he could possibly borrow, on Wretchedville, and then, as I have hinted, Bacchus and he became inseparable companions, and he continued to "wreathe the rosy bowl" and "quaff the maddening wine cup," the two ordinarily assuming the guise of rum-and-water, cold, till he woke up one morning in the Messenger's Office in Basinghall-street, waiting for his protection. Swamper, the great buyer-up of carcases, was a secured creditor, and came into possession of Wretchedville; but Swamper is the world-known contractor, whose dealings with the Bucharest Improvements, and the Herzegovina Baths and Washhouses Company, have been made lately the subject of such lively public comment. He is generally oscillating between his offices in Great George-street, Westminster, and the Danubian provinces, and has had little time to attend to Wretchedville. He has been heard to express an opinion that the place—the confounded hole he calls it—will "turn up trumps" some day; and, indeed, plans for a new county prison, on a remarkably eligible site between Doleful-hill and Sobbington, have been hanging up for some time, neatly framed and glazed, in his office. Meanwhile the Wretchedville rents are receivable by Messrs. Flimsy and Quinsy, auctioneers, valuers, and estate agents, of Chancery-lane; and Swamper's affairs being, as I am given to understand, in somewhat evil trim, it is not unlikely that Wretchedville, ere long, will fall into fresh hands. And I don't envy the man into whose hands it falls.

How I came to be acquainted with Wretchedville was in this wise. I was in