Page:Once a Week Jun to Dec 1864.pdf/333

318 dripping she sold, without any consideration of the best scraps and unlawfully large pieces of bread and meat which some cooks, more generous than just, “give them out of charity,” thereby ignoring the validity of the eighth commandment in respect of their own consciences.

There is one more emporium for wearing apparel open to the poor mothers, besides the pawnshop and marine-store shop. This is the redoubtable tally-shop. At these shops the poor spend more money than they can righteously afford. These shopmen take weekly payments. By the time the last three pence or sixpence is paid, the new dress has already a more than shabby appearance.

These made-up and unmade dresses and coats have a showy and plausible look about them, and the wife and elder daughter, ever anxious to be as well-dressed as their neighbours, buy the mantle or whatever they fancy, on the ground of not having to pay down for the “sweet thing,” and reckon on the chances of an increase of work in fair weather, but not on the likelihood of sickness coming amongst them to straiten their little incomes, if not to cut them off entirely. I consider the tally-shops sources of vanity to any poor family, and I even prefer the pawn-shop and marine-store establishment to these tricky places of debit and credit. It has often astonished me how the very poorest part of our population manage to keep themselves in any description of clothing; but their means and appliances in this respect are often unique. A year or two ago, I read in one of our Missionary Reports of a woman keeping herself in shoe-leather by the sale of corks (probably to the marine-store dealer), which she from time to time picked out of the rubbish heaps at Highgate. I never see a stray cork in my path, but I think of that thrifty dust-rummager. What becomes of all the pins we drop out of our dresses, &c., might be a subject for speculation to ladies; and what can become of the hair-pins we lose out of our back-hair? We sow them about the house, garden, and our usual whereabouts, but they never seem to come to light again, once dropped. Our maid “has not seen them about the floor,” and “has not picked them up.” Is it not within the range of probability that some day our missionary may find out a worthy itinerant who has discovered the colony of stray hair-pins, and is keeping herself in bonnets by her researches into our impenetrable mystery?

I proposed to paste pictures on to brown holland rolls for children. Shall I tell you a truth concerning the amusements of small children in our parish, rather too small to run about the streets alone, and who are too young to attend school unless a bigger child can accompany them to the infants’ school, and sit by them while there (for we occasionally take a baby child in with its elder brother or sister, who are scholars)? These little creatures never know what it is to possess a legitimate plaything. A broken shovel or knife, and lid of a tin saucepan, are their ordinary toys. A few months ago, I went into a remarkably dirty house, and in one of the rooms, tenanted by a slovenly woman and four children, I saw on a large bedstead a child, eighteen months old; his features were so begrimed with black dirt, that he looked quite a little ruffian, and hardly human, as his thick, long hair hung matted over his forehead and about his cheeks. In his left hand he held upright, like a sword or sceptre, a long, rusty, but unbroken carving-knife! I asked his mother if he would not hurt himself with such a dangerous plaything. “No, mum,” she replied; “I don’t think he’ll hurt hisself. He’s routed that out o’ the dust ’ole this mornin’, and he’s been very busy with it ever since—ain’t you, dear?”

I left him motionless on the bed, staring after me like a little wild animal, with his carving-knife still erect. The mother did not take it away, and I dare say, if it has not yet run into him (while his mother is busy and he himself is fractious and requires diversion), he still continues to sit upon the bed with his carving-knife!

Another of his brethren, perhaps, relieves guard with a shovel, or saucepan, in his turn of tantrums. Surely, some of our own children’s broken toys would be more eligible than these dangerous implements of amusement! A bigger child will amuse itself by poring over a low paper filled with vile pictures, and portraits of personages and actors in scenes which our own never heard of, much less read of. When the baby boy is troublesome to manage, one of these wretched papers is held out before his gaze, and he is diverted or frightened out of his rages by the edifying spectacle of the execution of the pirates, or something of a like complexion. Give him a few of your old toys, and the small London pauper will want to play with neither carving-knife nor shovel, and will be cleaner and better tempered in his bed, as his visits to the dust-hole in quest of playthings will be no longer necessary. Pictures of sacred subjects are highly valued by the poor, and, as I have before observed, especially among the old women who cannot read. Some of our old women possess the most extraordinary executions of art anywhere to be seen. How they come by them I cannot tell, for some are