Page:Once a Week Jun to Dec 1864.pdf/334

. 10, 1864.] foreign; picture and frame too. One of my old ladies has a rude daub of the Crucifixion, in an old carved frame. At the base is written: “Es ist Vollgebracht.” I have seen another of the same subject, but a better production in the way of art, and I understood it was a gift from a young lady. The owners do not always know how these precious relics came to them; they are very fond of these and their chimney-ornaments, and even when starving will neither pawn nor sell them. One old woman told me she hides them when the “hofficer,” as she calls him, comes from the workhouse to spy out the nakedness of the land. “One day, mum, he see’d them, and said, ‘Why don’t you turn these into bread?’ I’d rather lie here and starve, mum, I would; and when he comes again, I’ll be bound he don’t see ’em no more.” She said this to me, crying and moaning, as if they were her grandchildren that she had been ordered to consume for food. She tells me “she watches ’em at night, and they quite talk to her when she can’t sleep” and has her rushlight burning on the table. A plaster cast, the size of a new-born baby, stands on her mantel-piece, and always looks as if it would fall on her old head some day. It is meant for Napoleon I. The uniform is picked out in green and red; the best part of the white figure is the cocked hat. It has been her property some years, and is unbroken.

She had been drawing my attention to her pictures and little figures on the mantel-piece, and telling me what they were; at last I said, “Well, who is that figure at the end?” “Oh, he’s either the Dook, Bonyparty, or Nelson, I don’t know which; but he’s one of ’em, I know.” I satisfied her for the time he was “Bonyparty.” But she will not bear this in mind; she has been so long a time vague in her ideas respecting the identity of this plaster gentleman. The aged live in the past, the aged poor especially. The impressions of youth alone are ineffaceable. Were any one to-morrow to ask her who it was, she would go through with her heroes again, and finish with “I don’t know which, but it’s one of ’em.”

Most families have a large amount of what we designate as rubbish and lumber in the old dark cupboards and attics in their houses, and though our corks and hair-pins may not turn up in these local dust-heaps, many a trifle, of no value to ourselves, may be picked out and sent off to dress the mantel-piece and divert the listless sick woman and child in the dwellings of our London poor. New scraps of velvet, silk and cloth, ends of ribbon, spare beads, &c., such as many among us throw away as useless cuttings after we have completed some piece of fancy work, may be saved, with much advantage, for the use of our poor women and children.

There are invalids who are too feeble to maintain a livelihood by rough work, such as charing, washing, and ironing all day long. These sit at home and make up fancy articles, such as needle-books, pin-cushions, and pen-wipers, to sell in the streets or at the different shops and bazaars. I know one old widow afflicted with dropsy and a bad leg. The parish allows her one shilling and sixpence and a loaf per week. The one shilling and sixpence does not pay the rent of her tiny dark back room, which costs her two shillings weekly. She has now and then a bad attack of illness, and her work, of course, stands still, and we keep her from starving by parochial relief. When able to go about, she makes pincushions and pen-wipers out of cloth and beads, and hawks them about the street; but she is known in the neighbourhood, and the servants grow tired and irritated at being often called up in the middle of their work to a basket of pen-wipers, and she tells me the door is now and then “at once” banged in her face, and that’s all. “You see, mum, I can’t get further off to sell. They get tired of me hereabouts,” is her universal complaint. She buys the cloth and velvet out of which she cuts her pen-wipers, at eightpence per pound, in the Jew’s cloth market, on a Thursday, in Shoreditch. She is obliged to go there in an omnibus. The fare is eightpence (fourpence there and back), then she has to buy the beads and braiding for the fancy embroidery of the little wares elsewhere. She is by no means happy in her designs, bringing me elephants, tulips, Turkish caps, tea-pots, and blue-coat boys, to inspect and get sold for her when she is about to be laid up, and can’t crawl about. As I have had these things on my hands now and then, and cannot sell them, I have remonstrated with her on her erroneous taste, but with slight success.

“Why don’t you make them all of one sort, as most of my friends prefer the simpler cloth ones, and not those silly tulips and dolls and tea-pots?” “Well, mum,” was her reply; “you see it’s taste, it is. I can sell them tea-pots very well, and I walked down to King Edward’s School o’ purpose to dress them dolls like the scholars, and that’s the beauty of them; it’s the dress exact, and I have taken many a fourpence on ’em, I have, mum; and you must have something to ’tract the eye when you open your bundle, you know, mum. It wouldn’t do to take them