Page:Braddon--The Trail of the Serpent.djvu/88

84 got to go over and look up some evidence in the village. I'll tell you what I'll do with you; I'll take you and baby over in Vorkins's trap—he said as how he'd lend it me whenever I liked to ask him for the loan of it; and I'll stand treat to the Rosebush tea-gardens."

Never had the dirty alphabet fashioned such sweet words. A drive in Mr. Vorkins's trap, and the Rosebush tea-gardens! If Kuppins had been a fairy changeling, and had awoke one morning to find herself a queen, I don't think she would have chosen any higher delight wherewith to celebrate her accession to the throne.

Kuppins had, during the few months of Mr. Peters's residence in the indoor Eden of No. 5, Little Gulliver Street, won a very high place in that gentleman's regards. The elderly proprietress of the Eden was as nothing in the eyes of Mr. Peters when compared with Kuppins. It was Kuppins whom he consulted when giving his orders for dinner; Kuppins, whose eye he knew to be infallible as regarded a chop, either mutton or pork; whose finger was as the finger of Fate in the matter of hard or soft-roed herrings. It was by Kuppins's advice he purchased some mysterious garment for the baby, or some prodigious wonder in the shape of a bandanna or a neck-handkerchief for himself; and this tea-garden treat he had long contemplated as a fitting reward for the fidelity of his handmaiden.

Mr. Vorkins was one of the officials of the police force, and Mr. Vorkins's trap was a happy combination of the cart of a vender of feline provisions and the gig of a fast young man of half a century gone by—that is to say, it partook of the disadvantages of each, without possessing the capabilities of either: but Mr. Peters looked at it with respect, and in the eye of Kuppins it was a gorgeous and fashionable vehicle, which the most distinguished member of the peerage might have driven along the Lady's Mile, at six o'clock on a midsummer afternoon, with pride and delight.

At two o'clock on this June afternoon, behold Mr. Vorkins's trap at the door of No. 5, Little Gulliver Street, with Kuppins in a miraculous bonnet, and baby in a wonderful hat, seated therein. Mr. Peters, standing on the pavement, contemplated the appointments of the equipage with some sense of pride, and the juvenile population of the street hovered around, absorbed in admiration of the turn-out.

"Mind your bonnet don't make the wehicle top-heavy, miss," said one youthful votary of the renowned Joe Miller; "it's big enough, anyways."

Miss Kuppins (she was Miss Kuppins in her Sunday costume) flung a Parthian glance at the young barbarian, and drew down a green veil, which, next to the "fondling," was the pride of her