Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/290

280[February 20, 1869] "Well," replied the butcher boy. "It's a lively place, a werry lively place. I should say that it was lively enough to make a cricket bust himself for spite: it's so uncommon lively." And with this enigmatical deliverance the butcher boy relapsed into a whistle of the utmost shrillness, and rattled away towards Sobbington.

I wish that it had not been quite so golden an afternoon. A little dulness, a few clouds in the sky might have acted as a caveat against Wretchedville. But I plodded on and on, finding all things looking beautiful in that autumn glow. I came positively on a gipsy encampment; blanket tent; donkey tethered to a cart-wheel; brown man in a wideawake, hammering at a tin pot; brown woman with a yellow kerchief, sitting cross-legged, mending brown man's pantaloons; brown little brats of Egypt swarming across the road, and holding out their burnt-sienna hands for largesse, and the regular gipsy's kettle swinging from the crossed sticks over a fire of stolen furze. Farmer Somebody's poultry simmering in the pot, no doubt. Family linen—somebody else's linen yesterday—drying on an adjacent bush. Who says that the picturesque is dead? The days of Sir Roger de Coverley had come again. So I went on and on admiring, and down the declivitous road into Wretchedville, and to Destruction.

Were there any apartments "to let?" Of course there were. The very first house I came to was, as regards the parlour window, nearly blocked up by a placard treating of apartments furnished. Am I right in describing it as the parlour window? I scarcely know, for the front door, with which it was on a level, was approached by such a very steep flight of steps that, when you stood on the topmost one it seemed as though, with a very slight effort, you could have peeped in at the bedroom window, or touched one of the chimney-pots; while, as regards the basement, the front kitchen—I beg pardon, the breakfast parlour—appeared to be a good way above the level of the street. The space in the first floor window not occupied by the placard, was filled by a monstrous group of wax fruit, the lemons as big as pumpkins, and the leaves unnaturally green. The window below—it was a single windowed front—served merely as a frame for the half-length portrait of a lady in a cap, ringlets, and a colossal cameo brooch. The eyes of this portrait were fixed upon me, and before, almost, I had lifted a very small, light knocker, decorated, so far as I could make out, with the cast-iron effigy of a desponding ape, and had struck this against a door which, to judge from the amount of percussion produced, was composed of Bristol board, highly varnished, the portal itself flew open, and the portrait of the basement appeared in the flesh. Indeed, it was the same portrait. Down stairs it had been Mrs. Primpris looking out into the Wretchedville road for lodgers. Upstairs it was Mrs. Primpris letting her lodgings, and glorying in the act.

She didn't ask for any references. She didn't hasten to inform me that there were no children, or any other lodgers. She didn't look doubtful, when I told her that the whole of my luggage consisted of a black bag, which I had left at the Sobbington station. She seemed rather pleased than otherwise at the idea of the bag, and said that her Alfred should go for it. She didn't object to smoking; and she at once invested me with the Order of the Latch-key—a latch-key at Wretchedville, ha! ha! She further held me with her glittering eye, and I listened like a two years' child, while she let me the lodgings for a fortnight, certain. Perhaps it was less her eye that dazed me than her cameo, on which there was, in high relief, and on a ground of the hue of a pig's liver, the effigy of a young woman with a straight nose and a round chin; and a quantity of snakes in her hair. I don't think that cameo came from Rome. I think it came from Tottenham-court-road.

She had converted me into a single gentleman lodger, of quiet and retired habits—or was I a widower of independent means seeking a home in a cheerful family?—so suddenly, that I beheld all things as in a dream. Thinking, perchance, that the first stone of that monumental edifice, the Bill, could not be laid too quickly, she immediately provided me with Tea. There was a little cottage loaf, so hard, round, shiny, and compact, that I experienced a well-nigh uncontrollable desire to fling it up to the ceiling, to ascertain whether it would chip off any portion of a preposterous rosette in stucco in the centre, representing a sunflower, surrounded by cabbage leaves. This terrible ornament was, by the way, one of the chief sources of my misery at Wretchedville. I was continually apprehensive that it would tumble down bodily on to the table. In addition to the cottage loaf, there was a pretentious teapot which, had it been of sterling silver,