Page:Once a Week Volume V.djvu/33

26 Rarey gulled the public when he charged ten guineas a course for teaching what none but such as himself could do.

There are intermittent phases of this penny commerce, as any one may see who observes how on any public occasion the number of merchants is multiplied tenfold. During the cattle show in Baker Street, whole groves of penny sticks line the streets about Portman Square. I have several times thought it would be a safe investment to buy them all, and make cent. per cent. of one’s money. I am sure I should be charged elsewhere fourpence—or threepence at least—for such batons as come into the market only then and there.

One passing penny speculation must be always a losing one. I mean in forms of prayer on the occasion of a day of national thanksgiving or humiliation. After service, at least, they are a drug. But the vendors begin quite early in the morning, increasing in importunity as the day passes; when the church bells strike up they grow more eager still, and thrust their wares upon the intending worshipper with desperate energy, like hawkers of playbills at the very door of the theatre. I fancy the theology of these extemporised penny merchants must be sometimes at fault; and a man might find out too late that his want of success in selling his wares to a string of supposed churchgoers arose from his being deceived by the ecclesiastical outside of a building, which did not within recognise the authority of his Grace the Archbishop.

Imagine a poor costermonger who had tried in vain to force the productions of the Establishment on a congregation of unorthodox Dissenters, and sat down to his table that night loaded, not with supper but with stale forms of prayer!

By the way, talking of the suddenness with which small vendors can be found to undertake commercial exigencies, I cannot help stopping a minute to express my wonder at the promptitude with which links are produced in a fog. Every penniless urchin has a link. Did you ever see a link, except in use? Did you ever know of a shopkeeper who kept, exhibited, or advertised a link? Should you know where to buy one, if you were offered a thousand pounds for it, on condition of its being produced in a quarter of an hour? But let the fog be ever so sudden—let it be so thick as to make hurried visits to the link-warehouse, wherever it may be, impossible; yet the fact remains, mysterious—inexplicable;—you meet scores: perhaps, by some wise economy of nature, they come with the fog, and are to be picked up in the parks, like rocket-sticks, after an exhibition of fireworks.

Only a penny! but we may rise in the commercial circles, and notice how frequently this is the fixed price of nobler articles than whistles and bad pen-holders. Think of Rowland Hill. Only a penny! was a flash of inspiration to him, communicated not only to Britain, but to Europe—to the world. The penny postage immortalises the Victorian age of England. The success, however, of this bold stroke has made the inventor exacting—labouring to expedite the delivery of these stamped letters, he has deceived not only himself, but the public, by trying to make them sort their correspondence before it comes into the hands of her Majesty’s servants. Those two mouths to the letter-box are an imposition. Mark the hesitating manner of that servant-girl with a bundle of letters in one hand, an umbrella in the other, as she tries to discharge her mission conscientiously, and yet run home before she has got wet through. She has an idea, poor honest thing, that if she makes a mistake about “Inland, Colonial, Foreign, and London and twelve miles round,” she may possibly lose her place. I was stopped the other day by an undecided messenger who shrank from dropping the entrusted letter into the wrong box.

“Please, sir,” said she, imploringly, “this is for Bury.”

It was raining fast. I need scarcely add that I set her right.

Before leaving this feature of penny commerce, I must express my regret at not having invented the little holes round the stamps. Was ever anything so successfully provoking? Some idle fellow hit upon it, I’ll be bound, with his slippers on, sitting before the fire, when he ought to have been at work,—talking nonsense and pricking a bit of paper with a pin, and tearing it up. All at once the Goddess of Invention descends into his lazy brain, and he finds the mutilated scrap in his hand transformed into a cheque for nobody knows how many thousand pounds.

Perhaps the most irritating reflection connected with this discovery is that similar valuable wrinkles are still lying hid under your own eyes and nose. Depend upon it, my friend, there is some ridiculously obvious process even now floating about, like a butterfly, which will at last alight on the acquisitive bump of some lucky head. What is it? It? Nay, there is a whole flight of these enriching thoughts circling around that thick skull of yours, saving your presence. Can’t you catch one? Can’t you invent a shirt-button now, which won’t come off in the washing, and so nip in the bud some series of recriminations which none but Sir Cresswell Cresswell can at last sum up, and save innumerable bachelors from precipitate wedlock.

A large family of steamers on the river held to the charge of two-pence for a long time—the penny boats raced, and were voted dangerous by old maids; but the mighty principle is asserting itself now, and the navigation laws above bridge are fast yielding to the penny. Omnibuses have yielded only in part, but if we are ever to have street-railroads, and are to be hauled along by steam from our breakfast-table to the Bank, the fare will be only a penny, you may be sure of that; the same price will then express the value of conveyance by land as well as by water all over the empire of London. As it is, parliamentary trains—which impress the stamp of our constitution on the railway system—are run at a penny a mile, this last phrase carries me into literature. The penny-a-liner. We fancy him in a seedy garret—like Hogarth’s distressed poet—spinning out his sentences with vulgar verbiage, in order that he may make the wherewithal to boil his hungry pot.

But the fact is There, now, that will do.

We may, however, notice that most remarkable