Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/291

Charles Dickens] would have been worth fifty guineas, but which, in its ghastly gleaming said plainly "Sheffield" and "imposture." There was a piece of butter in a shape, like a diminutive haystack, and with a cow sprawling on the top, in high relief. It was a pallid butter, from which with difficulty you shaved off adipocerous scales, which would not be persuaded to adhere to the bread, but flew off at tangents, and went rolling about an intolerably large tea-tray, on whose papier-mâché surface was depicted the death of Captain Hedley Vicars. The Crimean sky was inlaid with mother-of-pearl, and the gallant captain's face was highly enriched with blue and crimson foil paper. As for the tea, I don't think I ever tasted such a peculiar mixture. Did you ever sip warm catsup, sweetened with borax? That was something like it. And what was that sediment, strongly resembling the sand at Great Yarmouth, at the bottom of the cup? I sat down to my meal, however, and made as much play with the cottage loaf as I could. Had the loaf been varnished? It smelt and looked as though it had undergone that process. Everything in the house smelt like varnish. I was uncomfortably conscious, too, during my repast one side of the room being all window—that I was performing the part of a "Portrait of the Gentleman in the first floor," and that as such I was sitting to Mrs. Lucknow at Number Twelve, opposite—I know her name was Lucknow, for a brass plate on the door said so—whose own half-length portrait was visible in her breakfast parlour window, glowering at me reproachfully because I had not taken her first floor, in the window of which was, not a group of wax fruit, but a sham alabaster vase full of artificial flowers. Every window in Wretchedville exhibited one or other of these ornaments, and it was from their contemplation that I began to understand, how it was that the "fancy goods" trade in the Minories and Houndsditch throve so well. They made things there to be purchased by the housekeepers of Wretchedville. The presence of Mrs. Lucknow at the glass case over the way was becoming unbearable, when the unpleasant vision was shut out by the appearance of Mrs. Primpris's Alfred, who, with his sister Selina, had been sent to Sobbington for my bag. Alfred was a boy with a taste for art. In the daytime In' was continually copying the head of a Greek person (sex uncertain) in a helmet, who reminded you equally of a hairdresser's dummy in plaster, and of a fireman of the Fire Brigade. He used to bring studies of this party in white, red, and black chalk to me, and expect that I would reward him for his proficiency with threepenny pieces "to buy india-rubber;" and then Mrs. Primpris would be sure to be lurking outside the door, and audibly expressing her wish that some good, kind, gentleman would get Alfred into the Blue Coat School, which she appeared to look upon, as a kind of eleemosynary institution in connexion with the Royal Academy of Arts. I can't help suspecting, from sundry private conversations I had with Alfred, that he entertained a profound detestation for the plaster person in the helmet, and for the Fine Arts generally; but, as he logically observed, he was "kep at it," and "it was no use hollerin'." As for his sister Selina, all I can remember of her is that one leg of her tucked calico trousers was always two inches and a half longer than the other, and that for a girl of thirteen she had the most alarmingly sharp shoulder-blades I ever saw. I always used to think when I saw these osseous angularities, oscillating like the beams of a marine engine, that the next time her piston-rod like arms moved, the scapulæ must come through her frock. Mrs. Primpris was a disciplinarian; and whenever I heard Selina plaintively yelping in the kitchen, I felt tolerably certain that Mrs. Primpris was correcting her, on her shoulder-blades, with a shoe.

The shades of evening fell, and Mrs. Primpris brought me in a monstrous paraffin lamp, the flame of which wouldn't do anything but lick the glass chimney, till it had smoked it to the hue proper to observe eclipses by, and then sputter into extinction, emitting a charnel-house like odour. After that we tried a couple of composites (six to the pound) in green glass candlesticks. I asked Mrs. Primpris if she could send me up a book to read, and she favoured me, per Alfred and Selina, with her whole library, consisting of the Asylum Press Almanac for 1860, two odd volumes of the Calcutta Directory; the Brewer and Distiller's Assistant; Julia de Crespigny, or a Winter in London; Dunoyer's French Idioms; and the Reverend Mr. Huntington's Bank of Faith. I took out my cigar-case after this, and began to smoke; and then I heard Mrs. Primpris coughing, and a number of doors being thrown wide open. Upon this I concluded that I would go to bed. My sleeping apartment—the first floor back—was a