B 3 327 07b i % i m m BFP1 ■ * S\\\V 4ii m $fr % 7 ' ' -#5 j»i* *3 v Hf *5 *' I, Txi I) N : PHAH & HALL 193 s*. PAYED WITH GOLD OK THE ROMANCE AND REALITY OF THE LONDON STREETS. &n eanfas&tonable MobtV, By AUGUSTUS MAYHEW (ONE OF THE BROTHERS MAYHEW). » WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY H. K. BROWNE. LONDON : CHAPMAN AND HALL, 193, PICCADILLY. 1858. ><9cV MY BEOTHEE, HORACE MATHEW, THIS BOOK IS, WITH SINCERE AITECTION, DEDICATED. PREFACE. It has often struck me that if a truthful account were written of the miseries of criminal life, it would, by destroying the fancied ro- mance of wickedness, have a quicker effect in checking juvenile de- pravity than any moral appeals that ootid be made to the under- standings of the evil-disposed. Crime has now become a trade. Cunning is the only capital needed. The youths who take to this desperate calling are of such a nature that they are beyond a sense of danger. They would carve their names on gallows-wood as calmly as an Eton boy disfigures his desk. They are insensible to the fear of the law. Of course, crime means — unrestrained selfishness, or, in other words, the gratification of desires, regardless of the misery the indul- gence may inflict on others. There are many of the leaden-souled who, if crime were treated as a business speculation, — if the chances of profit and loss were as thoroughly weighed as when a merchant studies his ventures, — might be impressed with the folly of the risk, and, swayed by their selfishness, take to honesty as the better policy. As I have said, these wicked of the world have no fear of the law, but they have a full appreciation of personal advantages. Prove to them that the rewards of virtue are by one penny higher than those of vice, and they will, with marvellous rapidity, alter their courses. If they are once coaxed into this passive honesty, the schoolmaster may, with good prospects of success, commence his work. Of one thing I may humbly make a boast — the extreme truthfulness with which this book has been written. The descriptions of boy-life in the streets, the habits and customs of donkey-drivers, the peculiarities of tramp-dom and vagrancy, have all resulted from long and patient inquiries among the individuals themselves. They are actual records of the earnings and condition of these peculiar classes among the un- civilised of London. Indeed, some portions of this book (such as the chapters on the " Crossing-sweepers" and the " Eat Match" at the * Jolly Trainer") were originally undertaken by me at the request of my brother, Mr. Henry Mayhew, and will, I believe, form part of his invaluable work on " London Labour and the Poor." AUGUSTUS MAYHEW. March 1, 1858. M737572 ILLUSTRATIONS. Prontispiece. The Asylum toe the Houseless .... The Smash ...... Baby "Phil" in the Workhouse .... Philip at the Pauper School .... The Water-Cress Market . . . Young Philip joins a School op Crossing-Sweepers The "Doss" ...... " Phil" tries a New Walk in Life . A Midnight Pic-nic . . . The Great 100. Rat Match .... Bertha meets with many Priends The Prize Pight interrupted by the Police The Porged Cheque . . < Epsom Races ...... Phll's next Venture ..... The Tramps ...... The Captain, por the Pirst Time in his Life (he says), tastes Per pect Bliss / . The Meeting at Stonehenge .... The Pight in the Vagrant Ward Phil wishes he was Married .... Bertha is declared to have a Remarkably Small Pinger The Pamily op Nathaniel Crosier, Esq., aroused by an Alarm op Thieves . . . . Phil is declared to be a most Accomplished Youth . Important Business ..... Nathaniel Crosier, Esq., passes a very Restless Night page 9 61 76 91 118 128 146 158 179 187 211 235 253 277 288 3X0 320 333 375 384 403 CONTENTS. THE ROMANCE PRECEDING THE REALITY. CHAP. I.— A Crowd ....... II.— Frozen Out . . < . III.— The Refuge ...... IV.— Adrift ....... V.— The Release . . . PAGE 1 5 12 25 BOOK THE FIRST. YOUNG WORKHOUSE AND FATHER PARISH. I.--" Dragged Up" IX— The Pauper Boy's New Home .... III.— The Pauper School . . . . • IV.— Four Years and their Changes . • • V.— The Runaways ..... 33 41 47 54 65 HOOK THE SECOim CHILDHOOD IN THE STREETS I lX- m.- IV.- v.- VI.- m- VIII.- IX.- X.- XI.- XII.- XHL- XIV.- XV.- XVI.- xvn.- XVHI.- — The Start in Life —The Water-Cress Market -over-Heels -Caten-Wheeling and Head -On the Crossing -A Night on Town . -The Interview -Hampstead , . -On the Heath -Every Man has his Fancy -Friends Arrive -Captain Merton Crosier at Home -The Fight por the Championship -All Work and no Play . -Showing that Captain Crosier had no Idea of Money , . -Into the Fire . , . -In which the Captain does not Gentleman . % -The Derby Day . -Locked Up CONDUCT of the Value HIMSEIiP AS A 69 72 84 97 106 124 129 142 148 161 176 182 193 198 206 212 216 Vlll CONTENTS. CHAP. PAGB XIX.— Bertha, in Danger ...... 229 XX.— Out Nutting . • # • 23 * XXI.— Which will prove that a certain French Gentleman was not only Alive, but Stirring ..... 239 XXII.— A Hunt after Philip 242 X^XIIL— In re the Winding Up op the Grand National Marriage Insurance and Universal Matrimonial Benefit Company, Capital 700,000/., with Power to Increase to 7,000,000/. A Deposit of 6c?. per Share to be Paid on Allotment . 247 BOOK THE THIRD. THE ROAD TO RUIN. I.— On the Tramp .......... . . 250 II. — Captain Crosier narrowly escapes being an Honest Man . 257 III— " Accommodation for Travellers" . . . 265 IY.— Great Care is taken of the Hazlewood Family . . 270 V.— Stonehenge ....... 27S VI. — Billy Fortune proves that he cannot be Trusted Alone . 289 VIE.— In which we blush for the Captain . . . . 296 VIII— The Captain's Plot 301 IX.— HOW THE BEST YEARS OF PHIL'S LlFE WERE WASTED . . 309 X.— Bertha behaves like a Woman . . . . . 312 XI.— The Travelling Circus . . . . . . 317 XII.— The Captain is Guilty of what he considers a Great Waste of Money .*».... 321 XIII.— Some of the Adventures which befel Monsieur Emile Vautrin during Ten Years of his Life . . .334 XIV.— Containing many Incidents which ought to have been told pages ago, relating, among other circumstances, how Father and Son met, the Conversation that ensued, and in what manner phil followed his parent's advice . 340 XV.— Love and Vengeance . . . . . 347 XVI.— Vautrin gives his Son Physic and Advice . . 353 XVII.— Showing how Philip made vast Sums of Money . . 35 S XVIII.— In which a Father drinks away his Daughter . . . 367 XIX— Philip "Goes In and Wins" 374 XX.— A Marriage which was evidently not made in Heaven . 377 XXL— Cassandra II. 385 XXII.— A Wedding Trip 390 XX1IL— Mr. Vautrin, 3un., Visits the Continent . . .393 XXIV.— A Bed of Thorns 401 XXV.— Accounts are Settled . . . . . .406 "PAYED WITH GOLD." THE ROMANCE PRECEDING THE REALITY. CHAPTER I. A Kensington 'bus first pulled up, then a Hansom, then a parcels delivery cart, then a Chaplin and Home's van, then a " Royal Blue," an " Atlas," and two perambulators. Her Majesty's police-van was the only vehicle that drove by, and the gentleman in uniform who daily takes the air in the open cup- board. at the end, continued to read his penny "Morning £W" undis- turbed by the stoppage and the crowd. The black windowless omnibus divided for a few seconds the atten- tion of the throng in the road and on the pavement. The Kensington driver asked the police coachman " "What's yer fare all the way, my proosshun blue ?" The Atlas cad shouted out to the police conductor, " Won't any of your inside gents be so good as to ride outside to obleege a lady ?" Not only was the roadway blocked, but the pavement was covered by a mob, huddled together as closely as rats in a corner. It was a bitter, frosty winter's day, with an easterly wind blowing, that, as you faced it, filled the eyes with water, and made them smart like hartshorn ; but, despite the cold, the black circle of the crowd seemed every moment to acquire an additional circumference of curious pas- sengers. Where the people came from was a marvel. They seemed to leak in from all sides. Yet hardly any out of the scores that had collected together knew why they were stopping, or could even get a peep at the principal object of attraction. " What's up, Jim ?" said one of the 'bus drivers to his conductor, as the latter was returning to his bracket after diving into tho mob. " Is it cream o' the walley or fits as has overcome the lady ?" It was the dusk of the evening, and though the streets were thinned of their work-a-day traffic, the policeman had no sooner said to a woman seated on the door-step, " Now then, this won't do ; you B 2 PAYED WITH GOLD. must move on, you know," than instantly every person who was pass- ing the spot was brought to a dead halt. There were City gentle- men going home to dinner, and nurses wheeling the children home to tea ; clerks and linendrapers' assistants going back to business ; bricklayers with empty hods, ticket porters with their hands in their pockets, men about town, street boys, private soldiers, bill- stickers, return postmen, "roughs" and costers, and, indeed, the same incongruous mass that is always to be found in a London crowd ; for, as each person came drifting up the street, he seemed to be turned suddenly round by his curiosity, like a cork in a pent stream, so that ere long the mob appeared to consist of the same curious collection of odds and ends — human chips, straws, and rags as it were — as is seen jumbled together in front of a miller's dam. The most important business gave way to the excitement. There was a confectioner's man with an ice pudding in the green box on his head, and that pudding, so slowly thawing into liquor in the heated atmosphere of the mob, had been ordered for a neighbouring dinner party, /which had already eaten its way down to the game. There was an electric telegraph boy with his despatch-box at his side, con- taining a most important commercial message, which had just arrived by the sub-marine telegraph. There was a doctor's boy, with his little double-flapped market-basket, and he in a peevish voice was calling on the crowd to take care and " not go smashing his aperients." There was a milliner's lad, too, with his oil-silk covered basket, in which was carefully packed an elaborate head-dress for a lady, who, attired for the theatre, was anxiously watching for the arrival of the messenger, and yet there he was, jammed in the crowd, calling out every minute, " "Where are you a shoving to, stoopid," and " Now then, keep back, there, can't you, or you'll be a squashing this here turband and feathers." And there was a host of other people besides upon equally pressing errands. But every kind of business and work ap- peared to have come to a stand-still until each looker-on had been able to satisfy himself as to the cause why he, among a hundred others, was loitering there. A milkman who was near the centre of the crowd remarked to an elderly dame, as the policeman shook the wretched creature on the door-step, " She don't seem like an impostor, do she ?" " Well, there's no telling, I'm sure," replied the lady ; " but, if you ask me my private opinion, I should say she's been foolish enough to allow herself to be overtook by liquor." * Come, you mustn't be sitting here in the cold, do you hear. "Where do you live ?" cried the officer, as he took the woman roughly by the arm. She looked up with a vacant, sleepy expression, and muttered, " Nowhere." A carpenter, with a. nut-basket of tools over his shoulder, here stepped forward, and asked, in a kindly tone, " Ain't you got no lodgings, my good woman ?" " I was turned out of them two days ago," was the almost inaudible reply, for she spoke in so low a tone that her interrogator had to put his ear down to her bonnet to catch her words. PAVED WITH GOLD. "But haven't you got any friends who'll take you in ?" continued the workman. " No, no ; I'm a stranger here." And her chin and under lip began to work with the rising sobs. A man in the mob said coarsely to his companion, " Oh, come on, Bill, it's only a dodge." And the doctor's boy, seeing somebody quitting the crowd, suddenly thought of the powder he had in his basket for the baby in convulsions, and darted oif at full speed. " "Well, you know," said the policeman, "if you persist in stopping here, I must take you to the station." " Oh, thank you — anywhere," was the woman's reply. The policeman stood still, uncertain how to act, and the crowd began to discuss among themselves the merits of the case j some de- clared that she was " fairly starved down," others, " that she was only trying to excite compassion so as to get some drink out of it." A few of the more sensible, however, said she was ill, and that she ought to be taken to the doctor's directly. "If that young woman," exclaimed one, "were well fed and de- cently dressed, she'd be as tidy a looking girl as you could meet with in these parts." "You should take her to the workhouse," observed the car- penter ; upon which a man, with a pair of boot-fronts under his arm, burst out vehemently, saying, "It's the right of every true-born Briton to have food and shelter give 'em, and I mean to say as it's a cussed shame that any poor creeture should be left to starve like a dog in the streets, as this here party is." Then there was a cry among the mob of " Ah ! so it is, indeed," as if the thought had only just struck them all. " I tell you they won't take her in at the Union," expostulated the policeman, in answer to a hundred and one directions, " and I can't charge her at the station. Here, come along with me, young woman ; the only place for you is the 'sylum for the houseless in Playhouse-yard." As she did not attempt to move, but was settling down as if going to sleep again, the officer took hold of her arm to help her to rise ; but the miserable woman was so weak and faint with the cold and starvation, that she was unable to stand, and staggered back on to the step. " Shame ! shame !" cried the mob, growing indignant with the thought that she was to be dragged as a criminal through the streets. " Why don't you go and fetch a doctor, Bobby," shouted a coster ; " you see the poor thing can't step it." One of the neighbours, who, with her shawl turned over her head, had been standing on the next door-step, patiently watching the whole of the proceedings, now made her appearance with a cup of steaming tea in her hand. " Here, my dear," she said, as she stooped down and held a saucerfnl to the lips of the poor soul, " drink this ; it'll do you more good than listening to a pack of men's talk." The wretched, fainting creature sipped at the hot drink, and, though she seemed to swallow with difficulty at first, she said, in a short b 2 4 PAYED WITH GOLD. time, " Oh, thank you ! thank you ! that warms me a bit." And then, after a few more sips, she passed her hand over her forehead like one waking up from stupor, and, as she pushed the hair back, murmured, " I've had enough, I'm obliged to you ; I can go now." The policeman led her off, grasping her firmly under the arm, and half pushing her along, as though he were taking a " drunk and disorderly" to the station-house. The woman staggered in her gait, and seemed so helpless, that many among the crowd, gazing after her, were still divided in their opinion as to whether she were in liquor or in want. A host of little boys and straggling men and women fol- lowed in her wake along the pavement, like the sympathising crowd at the tail of an Irish funeral. " Ah ! she's seen better days, she has," said the kind-hearted dame who had brought out the tea, and who, with the cup still in her hand, was looking after her. " Her talk warn't like that of a common person ; and them hands of hern ain't done much work, for she hadn't so much as got any needle-marks on her forefinger." A crowd of female neighbours began to collect round the last speaker, and one observed, " I really think, do you know, Mrs. Perks, she had nothing on but that black stuff petticoat, and that she'd made away with the very gownd off her back. Why, it's enough to freeze all her blood to ice in such weather as this here." A thin woman, with a dry cough, observed, with a contemptuous toss of her cap, " "Well, all I've got to say is this one remark : If she's so very genteel as you ladies would wish to implicate, why don't she go to her friends ? Surely they might help her at least to emigrand. But this I will say, if a piece of goods like her is to meet with re- wards for miscondick — for every mother of a family among you must have noticed the situation she was in, and not so much as a wedding- ring to be seen on her finger — why, where'd be the use of females remaining virtuous and being circumspicious in their behaviour, like oiirselves ?" " Shame on yer, Mm. Starrer !" ejaculated the dame with the tea- cup ; " I hope it may never be your lot to be so sittewated yourself, and have a person to sit in judgment, jury and witnesses, on you, as you've been a doing to her, poor soul." It was, however, too cold to continue the discussion; so Mrs. Sparrow and the neighbours retired to their respective homes to talk the matter over with their husbands and fellow-lodgers. PAVED WITH GOLD. CHAPTEK II. FROZEN OUT. It was a bitter winter's day we have said. The snow had fallen thickly during the night, whilst all London was asleep, and the early waker in the suburbs, as he lay in his bed wondering what made the road so still and the morning light so bright, heard the song of the market carter, that without the rumble of a wheel he had traced creeping from the distance, cease suddenly, and followed by a cry of " Here, police ! come along, look sharp !" Then, as his curiosity sent him shivering to the window, he saw in the dawn the black, steaming horse stretched at full length upon the white roadway, kicking up the powdery snow like foam, with the carter leaning on its neck, and the piles of green cabbages in the cart all dabbed with flocks of snow. On the other hand, the heavier sleeper in the town was roused out of his last nap by the sound of shovels scraping harshly on the pavement, as if a hundred knife-grinders were at work in the street ; and others, who dozed still later, had their dreams abruptly cut in two by some dozen cadgers from the nearest low lodging-house, who, with a frost-tipped bit of green stuff raised on a pole, were all shout- ing together, at the top of their voices, " Poor froze-out gard'ners L poor froze-out gard'ners !" Truly there is hardly a more startling sight than to wake up and find the town, which yesterday was black with its winter's coat of soot and dirt, suddenly changed to a city of almost silver beauty, seeming as if it were some monster capital at the Polar regions, glittering with its glacial architecture, and bristling with its monu- ments, pinnacles, and towers, like so many palaces and temples hewn out of ice. Every house-top seems to be newly thatched with the virgin flocks, and every cornice striped as if with a trimming of the fairest down, All the verandahs are white as a tent-top, and the railings look as if made out of pith rather than ironwork ; every window-sill, and, indeed, the least ledge on which the foamy powder can lie, is thick and bulging with its layer of alabaster-like particles. On each door- step is spread the whitest possible mat, and each street-lamp is crowned with a nightcap of the purest fleece, whilst the huge coloured lamps over the chemists' seem gaudier than ever, and their blue and red bulls'-eyes look like huge gems set massively amid lumps of frosted silver. The various signs over the tradesmen's shops are nearly blotted out by the drift that has clung to them. The monster golden boot above the shoemaker's is silvered over on the side next the wind ; the " little dustpans" are filled with a pile of white fluff; the golden fleece, hanging over the hosiers' shops, seems to have changed 6 PAVED WITH GOLD. its metallic coat for one of the purest wool ; the three balls at the pawnbroker's appear to have been converted into a triad of gelder- roses ; and the great carved lions and unicorns between the first- floor windows of the royal tradesmen, have huge dabs of snow rest- ing on their necks, like thick, white, matted manes. The surface of the earth itself is white as a wedding-cake. In the roadway, in the early morning, you can count the traffic by the ruts the wheels have made, for every one leaves behind it a glistening trail as if some monster snail had crawled along the way. What a change, too, has taken place in the tumult of the busiest thoroughfares ! The streets that formerly deafened you with their noise are now hushed as night, and everything that moves past is silent as an apparition. Even the big clots of snow that keep on falling from the copings and the lamps and trees, startle you, from the utter absence of all sound, as they strike the earth. The wheels of the heaviest carts seem to be muffled, and roll on as if they were passing over the softest moss. The horses go along with their hoofs spluttering where the trodden ground has been caked into slipperiness, and the drivers walk at their head, with their hand upon the rein, while the nervous, timid brutes steam with the unusual labour, and their breath gushes down from their nostrils in absolute rays of mist. It is at this period, too, that the ice-cart makes its appearance in the streets. The costermonger who can no longer drive his trade at the green-markets, now looks to the ponds for a living, and comes to town with a load of transparent splintery fragments, that seem like jagged pieces of broken plate-glass windows. The omnibuses have an extra horse put on when they reach the metropolitan hills, for the snow in the roads has long before mid-day been rolled into ice, and the highways are like a long, broad slide. To accommodate the outsides, hay has been wound round the stepping-irons, and the gents on the "knife-board," along the roof of the first 'busses, appear with thick railway-rugs tucked round their knees, whilst, at the different halting-places, the conductor jumps down and stamps on the pavement, as he does a double-shuffle to warm himself, fling- ing his arms across his chest, and striking the breast of his top-coat with the same energy as if he were beating a carpet. Snow or sunshine, London work must be done ; but now the mechanics and clerks that you meet in the streets go along with their heads down and their hands in their pockets, at a half- trotting pace. Their necks are bound round with thick wisps of comforters, and the tips of their noses, that overhang the worsted network, are red, as if tinselled, and all sniff and cough, as they carefully dodge by the round iron plates over the coal-holes of the metropolis. The pave- ment in front of the bakers' shops is the only place from which the snow has entirely disappeared, and where the pedestrian can tread with safety. The whole town seems to swarm with boy and men sweepers, who go about from house to house, knocking at the doors, and offering to clear the pavement before the dwelling, according to Act of Parliament, for twopence. Everybodyyou meet has the breast of his great-coat and hat-rim dredged with white ; and the police- PAVED WITH GOLD. 7 man's shiny cape is, with its fur of snow, more like a nobleman's ermine tippet than the ordinary hard- weather costume of the force. How bright the air, too, seems with the light reflected from the snow. You can see to the end of the longest streets like on an early summer morning. There is a white, cold look about the scene ; and everything seems so black from the contrast of the intense glare of the ground, that even at noonday you might fancy that a silver har- vest moon was shining in the skies, and that the snow itself, lying on one side of each object, was but the reflexion of the pale brilliance of the white beams falling on them. The sky looks almost like a dome of slate, and the parks and squares like large new plaster models of countries without a single path or bed to be traced, except where the few passengers have worn a narrow dirty streak across them. The trees, too, are all ashy grey, and the objects in the distance seem to be twice as near as usual, while the dark specks of the people moving over the great snowy waste appear like blots on a sheet of paper. The statues throughout the metropolis have lost all artistic mo- delling in their form, and strike one as being as rudely fashioned as if they were so many figures moulded by schoolboys out of snow. Some, however, are merely speckled with the flakes, and have their Grecian draperies splashed over with white, like a plasterer's clothes. Sir Robert Peel, gazing down Cheapside, looks as if some miller had rubbed violently up against him. Old Major Cartwright, seated in his arm-chair in Burton-crescent, has at least a couple of pounds of snow resting on the top of his skull and dabbed over his face, and giving him the appearance of having been newly lathered previous to having his head and cheeks shaved. The periwig of Greorge III., at Charing-cross, has turned white in a night, like the hair of Marie Antoinette. The mounted effigy of E. M. the Duke of "Wellington, at Hyde Park-corner, continues, despite a spadeful of snow at the nape of his neck, to point with his baton — which is now white as a wax- candle — majestically in the direction of the White Horse Cellar, his patient steed having its hind-quarters covered w^ith so heavy a deposit that his Grace seems to be sitting, like a life-guardsman, on a mat of bleached sheepskin. Now the water-supply of the metropolis begins to be almost as scarce as in Paris ; while the water-pipes of the more prudent of the householders are seen bandaged round with straw, like the wheel- spokes of a new carriage. The turn-cocks, with their shiny leathern epaulets, go along with their immense keys, like those of some monster beer-barrel, and erect tall wooden plugs for the temporary supply of the neighbours, who flock there with pails and pitchers, and wait in a crowd to take their turn at the tap, while the waste water gutters and hardens over the snow like so much grease. But if there be a scarcity of water, the public-houses, at least, have determined to make up for it, for in the windows are printed placards announcing that " Hot Elder Wine" and " Hot Spioed Ale" may be had within. Taking advantage, too, of the "inclemency" of the weather, all kinds of warm comestibles suddenly appear on the 8 PAVED WITH GOLD. street-stalls. The fish kettles, full of "hot eels" and "pea-soup,** have a cloud of steam issuing from them, and the baked potato-cans are spirting out jets of a high-pressure vapour, like the escape-pipe to some miniature steam-factory. As you walk along the street, too, the nostrils are regaled by pleasant odours of baked apples and roasted chesnuts from the neighbouring stalls, at which sit old women in coachmen's many-caped coats, with their feet in an apple-basket, and a rushlight shade, full of red-hot charcoal, at their side — the fire shining in bright orange spots through the holes. The pert London sparrows seem almost to have disappeared with the frost, and the few that remain have a wretched half-torpid look, and have gone all fluffy and turned to a mere brown ball of feathers. In the suburbs, the robins are seen for the first time leaving little trident impressions of their feet on the garden snow, and their scarlet bosoms looking red as Christmas berries against the white earth. Then as the dusk of evening sets in, and you see in the squares and crescents the crimson flickering of the flames from the cosy sea-coal fire in the parlours, lighting up the windows like flashes of sheet- lightning, the cold, cheerless aspect of the streets without sets you thinking of the exquisite comfort of our English homes. But if grateful thoughts of comfort are suggested by the contrast of the snow, the same cause leads the more imaginative to think of the sharp, biting misery gnawing into the very bones of the luckless portion of London society. To those who can put on warm flannel, and encase their bodies in a thick great-coat, a sharp frost means only " healthy, bracing weather," and to such people the long evenings are -•— -flfeieome, from a sense of the happy family circle gathered round the bright cherry-coloured fire. To the well-born young silver-spoonbills of the "West- end, Christmas is a season of mirth and holiday games, of feasting, pantomimes, and parties. By the elder gentlefolks it is regarded as a time of good cheer, with its cattle-shows and " guinea- hampers," and presents of fat turkeys from the country ; for such as these, the butchers' shops are piled with prize-meat, coated with thick fat, and decorated with huge cockades — for such as these, the grocers' windows are dressed out with dried fruits and spices, and studded with lumps of candied peel ; and Covent-garden is lit- tered with holly, laurel, and mistletoe, and fragrant with the odours i of bright-coloured fruits. x 4 But how, think you, must the cold be welcomed by those whose means of living cease directly the earth becomes like cast-iron with the frost. How merry must Christmas appear to those whose tattered clothes afford no more protection than broken windows against the bleak, stinging breeze. How pleasant and cosy must the long evenings be to such as have to spend them crouching under the dry arches ; and how delicious the sight of the teeming markets to poor wretches who, to stay their hunger, must devour the refuse orange-peel lying about the stones there. Some readers, maybe, will fancy that such winter's misery is far from being common among our people ; but they should remember that in the lottery of life the prizes, as in other lotteries, are but the exception, and that the greater proportion of the chances are dead A PAVED WITH GOLD. 9 against those entering the lists, so that where one adventurer gets a lucky cast, thousands are doomed to end the game as badly as they began it. Readers should bear in mind, too, that with the luckless, the winter is especially the season when the wants are not only greater, but employment is scarcer, and, therefore, life harder than ever. Not to speak of the really destitute and the outcast, the well-to-do in London are surrounded by thousands whose labour lasts only for the summer — such as brickmakers, market-gardeners, harvest-men, and the like ; besides multitudes of others, such as navigators and ground-labourers, who can ply their trade only so long as the earth can be made to yield to the spade and the pick ; and others again, as the dock labourers and 'long-shore men, who depend upon the very winds for the food and fuel of themselves and families. The sceptical upon such matters, and more especially those who believe that destitution is always the result of idleness, should visit; the Asylum for the Houseless Poor; an asylum which is opened! only, be it said, when the thermometer reaches freezing-point, and) which offers nothing but dry bread and warm shelter to such as| avail themselves of its charity. To this place swarm, as the bitter winter's night comes on, some half-thousand penniless and homeless wanderers. The po- verty-stricken from every quarter of the globe are found within its wards ;' from the haggard American seaman to the lank Polish refugee, the pale German " out - wanderer," the tearful black sea- cook, the shivering Lascar crossing- sweeper, the helpless Chinese beggar, and the half-torpid Italian organ-boy. It is a ragged con- gress of nations, a convocation of squalor and misery, of desti- tution, degradation, and suffering, from all the corners of the^ earth. Almost every trade and calling are there too : agricultural/ railway, and dock labourers, thrown out of work by the frost; unemployed artisans, chiefly belonging to the out-door trades, such as carpenters and painters ; sailors without their registry tickets, who have either been cast away, or cheated of their all by the "crimps;" broken-down tradesmen, clerks, shopmen, and errand- boys, who either through illness or guilt have been deprived of their situations ; and, above all, Irish immigrants, who have been starved out of their own land. Moreover, there are poor needlewomen, driven for " back rent" from their lodgings ; servants out of place ; charwomen; real "frozen-out" garden-women; street-sellers, who , have eaten up their stock money ; tramps ; beggar-women ; and ol^J habitual vagrants. Nearly every shade and grade of misery, mis- fortune, vice, and even guilt, are to be found in the place ; for characters are not demanded previous to admission, and want alone is the sole qualification required of the applicants. The asylum for the house- less is at once the beggar's hotel, the, tramp's town-house, the outcast's haven of refuge — the last dwelling, indeed, on the road to ruin. The geography of the asylum for the houseless is somewhat diffi- cult to make out to those whose knowledge of London extends no 10 PAYED WITH GOLD. farther eastwards than the Boyal Italian Opera House, or even Exeter Hall. There are some streets that even the most experienced cabmen have to descend from their box half a dozen times, in order to ferret out the road to; and Playhouse-yard — the locality of the refuge — is one of these. The way lies up a long, narrow street, rendered still narrower by a double flank of stalls trestled along the kerb. At the corner of every turning hereabouts is a gin-palace, with a monster lamp sus- pended over the entrance, and a long, shell-fish stall in front of the door, set out with a trefoil arrangement of pen'orfchs of oysters, as big as muffins. Outside the bakers' shop-windows are stuck large bills, always announcing the grateful intelligence that bread is " Down Again to Even Monet;" and at the tea-dealers' there are comic placards, designed and coloured by ticket-writers, setting forth either the advantages of joining their "pudding club," or the dangerous strength of their " gunpowder tea." Pawnbrokers, too, abound in the neighbourhood; and at their door hang blankets and patchwork coun- terpanes, suspended from one corner, as in auction-rooms, while the watches, ranged in the windows, are as big and thick as the bull's- eye to a dark lantern. Nor is there any lack of coal and potato sheds ; and at these the current price of fuel is always quoted in chalk on a board at so much "per cwt" Here, too, on every Sunday in the summer season, the light spring-van, which at other times is used for enabling the neighbours to indulge in that exciting lunatic sport known as " shooting the moon," puts on curtains, and starts with a party of pleasure and a beer barrel for Hampton Court. The yard christened Playhouse is a lane that it is ridiculous to dream of entering in a cab. Accordingly, two or three street-stalls have to be disarranged, in order to allow your vehicle standing-room, and never was such commotion among the coster trucks and apple- stalls as when your Hansom endeavours to draw up to the kerb. As you turn the corner, you enter even a poorer district than before. Here pawnbrokers will not flourish, and " dolly-shops" are found to prevail instead, where even the pledges which have been refused by the " cruel uncle" are not rejected by those ebony " babes in the wood" that swing over the door as signs of the Black Doll. The baker's shop, the grocer's, and the coal warehouse have severally dis- appeared, and been rolled into one omnium-gatherum store in " the general line." The old Eortune Theatre stood in this same Playhouse-yard some two centuries and a half ago, and never was more pathetic drama per- formed there, under the auspices of the blind goddess, than that which is nightly represented at the asylum for the houseless ; for, rightly viewed, the scenes and changes enacted there are but a portion of the great play of fortune, and the ragged crowd within the walls but the wretched mummers to whom Pate has cast the sorriest parts. It is impossible to mistake the asylum if you go there at dark, just as the lamp in the wire cage over the entrance-door is being lighted ; for this is the hour for opening, and ranged along the kerb is a kind PAVED WITH GOLD. 11 of ragged regiment, drawn up four deep, and stretching far up and down the narrow lane, until the crowd is like a hedge to the roadway. Nowhere in the world can a similar sight be witnessed. It is a terrible thing to look down upon that squalid crowd from one of the upper windows. There they stand shivering in the snow, with their thin cobwebby garments hanging in tatters about them. Many are without shirts ; with their bare skin showing through the rents and gaps, like the hide of a dog with the mange. Some have their greasy garments tied round their wrists and ankles with string, to prevent the piercing wind from blowing up them. A few are with- out shoes, and these keep one foot only to the ground, while the bare flesh that has had to tramp through the snow is blue and livid-looking, as half-cooked meat. Tou can pick out the different foreigners and countrymen in that wretched throng by the different colours of their costume. There you see the black sailor in his faded red woollen shirt ; the Lascar in his dirty- white calico tunic ; the Frenchman in his short blue smock ; the countryman in his clay-stained frock, with the bosom worked all over like a dirty sampler ; and the Irish market-woman with her faded straw bonnet, flattened by the heavy loads she has borne on her head. The mob is of all ages, and women and girls as well as men and boys are huddled there close together. There are old-looking lads, shrink- ing within their clothes with the cold, and blowing their nails to warm their finger-tips; and mothers with their bosoms bare, despite the keenness of the weather, and the beggar babes sucking vainly at them. Each man has his hands in his pockets, and every now and then he shudders rather than shivers, as if positively palsied by the frost, whilst the women have the ends of their thin shawls and gauzy mantles rolled round their bare arms, like the cloths about a brigand's legs. It is a sullenly silent crowd, without any of the riot and rude frolic which generally ensues upon any gathering in the London streets ; for the only sounds heard are the squealing of the beggar infants, or the wrangling of the vagrant boys for the front ranks, together with a continued succession of hoarse coughs, that seem to answer each other like the bleating of a flock of sheep. Poor souls ! they are waiting in the numbing cold for those barn- like doors to open, and as the time draws near, those in the front are seen unfolding the bit of old rag or dirty paper in which they have secured the ticket that entitles them to some one or two nights' further shelter. It was to this refuge that the policeman referred when he said to the woman whom he found half frozen on the door-step, " The asylum for the houseless is the only place for you." It was to this refuge that the officer and the faint and weary creature were on their way — so faint and weary, indeed, that Heaven only knows what wretched fate would befal her if the bare hospitality of the place should be denied to her. 12 PAVED WITH GOLD. CHAPTEE III. THE REFUGE. > Some gentlemen had called at the asylum that day to see the place, and the class of persons usually admitted there. The superintendent was busy, before the opening of the doors, explaining to them, in the office at the side of the passage, the rules and customs of the institu- tion. The bare whitewashed entrance was so like that to the stage of some minor theatre, and the little office, with its wicket window giving into the passage, reminded one so forcibly of the room occu- pied by the stage-door keeper, that you might almost have fancied it had formed part of the old Fortune Playhouse. In a corner of the office itself stood several]square bread baskets, as big as sea chests, piled with little blocks of cut-up loaves, resembling both in size and colour so many fire-bricks. ""We give each person, on coming in at night," said the superin- tendent to the visitors, " half a pound of the best bread, and a like quantity on going out in the morning ; and children, even if they be at the breast, have the same, which goes to swell the mother's allowance. That gentleman," continued the officer, pointing to the clerk who was standing at the high desk beside the wicket window, " enters in this ledger" (it was as thick as a banker's) "the name, age, trade or pro- fession — for we've all classes here, I can assure you — and place of birth of the applicants, as well as where they slept the previous night." The strangers glanced their eyes down the several columns of this striking catalogue of destitution. The entries under the first three divisions showed, as we have said, that the asylum was the refuge for the outcasts of all ages, callings, and countries, but the last division was that which told the saddest tale of all; for as the eye ranged down the column indicating where each applicant had passed the previous night, it was startled to find how often the clerk had had to write down, "in the streets;" so that "ditto," "ditto" continually repeated under the same head sounded as an ideal chorus of terrible want in the mind's ear. J " "We are now going to begin, gentlemen," said the superintendent, as the office clock pointed to the hour of five. " Open the doors and admit new cases." Then, turning to the visitors, he added, " We take all the new cases here ; but those who have been in before and had tickets given to them, show them at another office farther on." A negro head, with a face as black as a printer's dabber, and eyes as white as hard-boiled eggs, suddenly appeared at the little wicket. "What's your name?" asked the clerk, in a rapid business tone. " Tippo Saib," was the answer. PAVED WITH GOLD. 13 "How old?" " Thirteen, master," said the lad, in the same imploring tone as if he were confessing to some fault. " "Where were you born ?" " Borned at sea, if please, master." " Ah, then, you've no settlement," observed the clerk, writing on. " "Well, and where did you sleep last night — eh, boy ?" " I had a pen'orth of coffee and slept there, master." Here the superintendent came forward, and, anxious to show off the advantages of the institution, in which he took no little honest pride, asked, " And where would you have slept to-night if you hadn't come here — eh ? In the streets, I suppose ? Ah, of course you would," he added, as the boy dolefully nodded assent. " Had anything to eat to-day, now ?" . » " I had two buscuits give me by the lady at the baker's, master." " Then I dare say you can enjoy half a pound of good bread ? Ah, I thought so. Here you are ! Now, what's the cause of your coming here ? You came home in a ship, I suppose, and had your pay — hadn't you?" The boy, who had his lips immediately buried in the hunk of bread, ceased biting for a while, and answered, as if his mouth was full of sawdust, " Yes, master ; I had two pund ten when I was paid off, three weeks ago, besides a chest full of clothes, which is at Mr. Finn's, where I lodged." "Ah," said the superintendent, turning to the visitors, "the old thing, gentlemen, ' crimps' again ! "We get hundreds that way. I suppose you owed a week's board, and he took your clothes, and left you nothing but what you stand upright in ? Ah ! I knew^it ! There, you can go." And the sun-charred lad, who had nothing but a blue woollen shirt to keep him from the frosty air, slunk shivering off, with his head half buried between his shoulders, as if he were trying to huddle his limbs together for warmth's sake. " That man at the window, now, is an habitual vagrant," said the superintendent, half aside, to the strangers, as another head appeared at the wicket " He comes to us regularly every year ; he winters in town as punctually as if he was a nobleman. So here you are again — eh ?" he added, turning to the unshorn, black-chinned vagabond, who kept working his body about inside his clothes as if he was all alive. " Yes, sir, I'm come again," answered the man, grinning, as he touched his brimless wide-awake. " You knows my name and age, and where I come from pretty well by this time." The fellow was a perfect picture of what in Henry the Eighth's time was styled a " valiant beggar." He stood nearly six feet high, and was a big-boned, " ugly customer" of a man. His clothes of fustian and corduroy were black and shiny with filth, as if they were smeared *. with pitch rather than dirt, and the sleeves of his jacket -were, for warmth's sake, tied tightly round his wrists with pieces of twine. He had evidently no shirt on, for his jacket was tied high up to the throat, and through the rents his bare and grimy skin was visible. " Let me see," said the clerk, " I think you were a carpet-weaver last vear ?" 14 PAYED WITH GOLD. The fellow observed " that would do as well as anything else." " And where did you sleep last night ?" inquired the clerk. "At Bethnal-green Union, please, sir." " And where the night before ?" broke in the superintendent. " Well, I was at Whitechapel Union, then, sir." " And what Union the night before that ?" " I think it were St. Greorge's in the East. Oh, no, sir, it were Stepney, so it were." The superintendent gave a look at the gentlemen, as much as to say, " You see he has made the round of the workhouses ;" and then added to the vagrant, " I suppose you don't like breaking those four bushels of stones the workhouse people give you of a morn- ing ?" The fellow answered with a leer, and another wriggle in his clothes, " It ain't exactly the kind of physic as suits my complaint, guv'nor." When the vagrant had gone, the superintendent said : " We are ' obliged to let in such cases as those, for, if we were to shut our doors because some impose upon us, we should be punishing the honest poor more than the dishonest." After a time — long before a fresh page of the ledger had been filled — the examinations of the applicants wore into monotony. They all told the same unvarying tale, and that was — "destitution." " Now, if you please, gentlemen, we'll go up-stairs and have a look at the wards," the superintendent continued; and so saying, he led -the way along the passage towards the lobby. " This," he said, " is where the men wash, before going to their beds." It was a square cockpit-like place, with a broad, wooden staircase in one corner, and on the opposite side was a large trough with a pump at one end. Here some of the ragged outcasts were cleansing themselves from their sleeping-out dirt, and indulging in their first wash for many a day ; whilst others, who, by soap and hard scrub- bing, had restored something like whiteness to their countenances, had mounted the platform where hung the long jack-towels, and were busy drying their skin. In this lobby, too, stood a crowd of applicants, who had already slept in the asylum on previous nights, and who were waiting round another wicket window to have their tickets checked. " What have you been doing since you slept here last, my man ?' ? the superintendent said to a pale artisan, dressed in canvas spotted with dabs of oil colour, that told he was a house-painter. " I ain't been here for a fortnight, sir," answered the mechanic ; " a friend of mine as is going to open a eel-pie shop give me a job." Upon this the superintendent observed to the visitors: "You perceive they don't come here unless they are positively driven to it, and when they can afford a night's lodging elsewhere they are glad to get it." The next step was to inspect the wards; and, accordingly, the visitors were conducted into what is termed the " lower," or men's ward. The sight was utterly unlike all preconceived notions of a dormitory. There was not a bedstead to be seen, nor even so much as a sneiTor PAVED WITH GOLD. 15 blanket visible. The ward itself was a long, bare, whitewashed apart- ment, with square post-like pillars supporting the flat-beamed roof, and reminding the visitor of a large unoccupied store-room — such as are occasionally seen in the neighbourhood of Thames-street and the Docks. Along the floor were ranged what appeared at first sight to be endless rows of empty orange chests, packed closely side by side, so that the boards were divided off into some two hundred shallow-tanpit-like compartments ; and these, the visitors soon learnt, were the berths, or, to speak technically, the " bunks" of the institution. In each of them lay a black mattress, made of some shiny waterproof material, like tarpauling stuffed with straw. At the head of every bunk, hanging against the wall, was a leather, a big " basil" covering, that looked more like a wine-cooper's apron than a counterpane. These are used as coverlids because they are not only strong and durable, but they do not retain vermin. In the centre of this ward was a large double-faced grate, with a bright piled-up coke fire, that glowed like a furnace both behind and before. The space around was railed off, the railings serving in rainy weather as a clothes-horse upon which to dry the wet rags of garments of the inmates whilst sleeping. Around the fierce stove was gathered a group of the houseless wanderers, the red rays tinting the crowd of haggard faces with a bright lurid light that coloured the skin as red as wine ; and one and all stretched forth their hands, as if to let the delicious heat soak into their half-numbed limbs. They seemed positively greedy of the warmth, drawing up their sleeves and trousers so that their naked legs and arms might present a larger surface to the fire than even the wide and frequent holes in their rags permitted. They appeared all as if longing to stretch themselves like cats at full length before the stove. Not a laugh nor sound was heard, but the men stood still, munching their bread, their teeth champing like horses in a- manger. One poor wretch had been allowed to sit on a form inside the railings, for he had the ague, and there he crouched, with his legs near as a roasting joint to the burning coals, as if he were trying to thaw his very marrow. Then how fearful it was to hear the coughing, as it seemed to pass round the room from one to another, now sharp and hoarse as a bark, then deep and hollow as a lowing, or — with the old — feeble and trembling as a bleat. There were boys of ten, like dwarfs of twenty ; and old men, with the bent kangaroo-like hands and drivelling mouth, so indicative of idiocy. Every one seemed to have been made apathetic by long misery ; even strong, stalwart fellows sat in lumpish silence, staring vacantly at the floor (for your true vagrant's mind is a dull blank) ; whilst others, who were footsore and worn out with their day's tramp, were busy unlacing their stiff, cast iron-like boots. " What makes you shiver so, my man ?" asked the superintendent of a vagrant-looking old creature, whose whole body seemed to shake like a jelly, and whose hand, as he tried to cut his bread with his clasp-knife, trembled as if he were erasing a blot rather than carving his food. 16 PAYED WITH GOLD. " We-e-ell it's the co-o-old I've got in me, master, and I ca-a-an't get it out of my bo-o-ones, do what I will. I've got a drea-a-adful bad leg, too-o-o. I'm going on for sixty-five year-r-r, and I can't get my pa-a-arish to take me no-ho-o-ow." And then, as if he were as proud of his sores as a warrior of his scars, he, with his bread still in his hand, raised his trouser and exhibited an ulcerous leg that sickened you to look at. As the superintendent and the visitors walked round the ward on their way back, they found many of the inmates already stretched in their bunks, with the leather rolled round them, till they looked more like huge brown paper parcels than sleeping human beings. " The other wards, gentlemen," said the official to the strangers as they passed along, " you'll find just the same in appearance and prin- ciple as this. We have two of them above — the ' chapel ward ' and the 'upper ward,' as we call them — only the chapel ward is for the better sort of men, and the upper one for women. All these gangways between the bunks, where we are now walking," he con- tinued, " will be sure to be filled up on such a bitter night as this before twelve o'clock, so that the floor will be entirely covered with some hundreds of poor destitute creatures, who must, perhaps, have perished with cold if it hadn't been for our institution. "That man sitting up in his bunk," went on the officer, "is a cripple, and he's always one of the first to turn in, exactly in that place, because he gets out of the way there, and nobody has to step over him." Presently they passed one of the thermometers affixed to a wooden pillar. The officer looked at it for a moment, and then shouted across the room to one of his assistants, " Come, I say, make up the fires ! this won't do ! we're only at 45 instead of 60, and there's too much coughing by far." At this point a messenger from the outer office approached the official, and said, partly aside to him, " There's a policeman, sir, at the gate, has brought a woman along, whom he says he found half frozen on a door-step. She seems a better kind of person." " Yery well," answered the head officer ; " take her name down, as usual, and let her go up-stairs to the chapel ward, and I'll see her directly." " The policeman says, sir, he thinks she wants food," continued the messenger. "Indeed," replied the officer; "then you had better tell the matron to give her a basin of gruel directly, and not wait for the doctor's seeing her." " Now there's an instance of the good we effect, gentlemen," he added, turning to the visitors. " "What would a poor creature like that have done if it hadn't been for some such charity as this ?" The chapel ward is the place whither all fresh applicants are sent to be examined by the doctor, previous to admission for the night. This ward was the same long, bare, and binned-off apartment as the lower one, but, owing to the pile of forms used for divine service on the Sunday, and which are stacked up out of the way, one on each PAYED WITH GOLD. 17 other, on the week days, as well as the academy-like tall desk near the stove in the centre of the room, it had much the look of an empty day-school. The only evidence, however, of the ecclesiastical character of the place was a clumsy brown pulpit, as rude as if it had been made by a packing-case maker. Here, on forms, sat the fresh cases of that evening, the males on one side of the room and the females on the other, whilst the doctor stood at the desk with his minute-book open before him. " Now then, the male cases," he said ; and the men advanced in single file. His assistant at his side cried, " Come along, show the back of your hands and open your fingers well ;" and immediately afterwards he held a lighted candle close to the skin of each, as they stretched out their arms for examination. " Now then, the women, come along !" called out the assistant- And instantly the long line of wretched outcasts rose as suddenly as if a hymn had been given out. At the end of the form the woman who had been brought there by the policeman had been sitting — as far apart from the others as the limits of the bench would admit of. "When the signal was given for them to come forward, she rose a minute or two after the rest, for she had been roused from brooding over her misery only by the noise of her neighbours' feet. And when she stood up she hung her head so that none could see her face. " What are- the usual complaints of the people seeking shelter here ?" asked one of the visitors of the doctor, who answered, as he continued, half-methodically, his examinations. " The most frequent are cases of exhaustion from exposure to cold and privation, as well as ordinary colds and sore-throat, complicated with affection of the chest, and so on. There, you see, is our medical report for the last year, and that contains all I could tell you on the matter." The list of diseases was a fearful exposition of bodily ailment en- gendered by want — a catalogue that even those who are too ready to believe that the majority seeking charity are tricksters and cheats, must have acknowledged as a solemn voucher of the privations en- dured by the poor destitute and houseless wretches asking shelter at ^ the asylum. For, as the eye ran down the list of bodily afflictions y endured by the class, it read at a glance, even though informed by the smallest medical knowledge, a tale of long agony, which is far beyond fiction to rival. The many cases of "catarrh"" and "influenza," the "rheumatism," "bronchitis," "ague," "asthma," "lumbago," "in- flammation of the lungs," "diseased joints," "spitting of blood," " cramps and pains in the bowels," all spoke their terrible testimony of many nights' exposure to the wet and cold. Whereas the instances of " abscesses," "ulcers," "diarrhoea," "low nervous fever," "atro- phy," and " excessive debility from starvation" tol4>in a manner that precluded all doubt> of the want of proper sustenance and extreme ,p privation of those, the very poorest of all the poor. It showed, todf that even the vagrant life of the tramp was sufficiently punished, so that the sternest " economist" might have learnt some little charity towards those who had done such bitter penance for their faults. 18 PAVED WITH GOLD. By this time it had reached the turn of the last of the new comers to approach the desk. She held out her hands methodically as the others had done. The quick eye of the doctor noticed how thin and spare they were, for the whole mechanism of the fingers seemed to he visible under the transparent skin. He took her by the wrist, and as he kept his fingers on her pulse, looked first at her face, then glanced at her figure, and said, " My good woman, this is no place for you — are you married?" He had asked the question rather abruptly — in the ordinary way of business — and he was somewhat surprised to see the colour mount to the poor thing's cheeks with shame at the question. She, however, replied plaintively, as she sighed and shook her head, "I wish I was not." " I didn't mean to wound your feelings," continued the doctor, in a kindly tone, " but I saw no wedding-ring on your finger." She shrugged her shoulders, and replied, " I was forced to part with that long ago." The doctor called the superintendent, and drew him aside to talk with him in private. After a time the official returned to the woman, and said, " My good soul, it's against the rules of this institution to receive anybody in your condition. I'll tell you. what we must do with you. We shall give you a shilling, as we do others like you, so that you may obtain a night's lodging somewhere, and then you will have a settlement and a claim on the parish where you slept." The woman grew blanched as she heard the words, and she stag- gered back in utter despair. Poor thing ! she had already applied at one "Union, and they had told her that she must go back to where she had been born, for her settlement was there ; and she had heard that at the asylum for the houseless cases were received which the work- house refused, and now she learnt that the last refuge was denied her, and she felt that nothing was left her but to die in the streets. " If your case was very urgent we should send you to the hospital," added the official, soothingly ; " but as it is, you had better rest here awhile and have another ration of bread and some more warm gruel, and then you'll be able to find a lodging for yourself." The wretched creature thought what was to become of her when that little shilling was gone, and she hid her face in her hands as she sobbed convulsively. The strangers, who had been watching the woman for some little time, now stepped forward, and inquired the cause of her grief. " Have you no friends or relatives living ?" asked one of them. But the woman made no, answer, and looked proudly at the speaker, as if questioning his right to pry into her misery. Then she buried her face in her hands once more. " "We would serve you if possible, my good woman," continued the stranger; "so pray tell me, since you are married, where is your husband ?" She answered bitterly, as if stung by the remembrance of the ill- treatment she had suffered, " He has deserted me after robbing me of all I had." And then, as if fancying she had committed herself, she added, " Ask me no more — ask me no more, I beg of you I" PAVED WITH GOLD. * 19 The superintendent here interposed, saying, " "We had a case much like this last year, — a very nice girl, who had run away and got married against her family's consent, but we wrote to her friends and got them to take her back again." The woman shook her head as she heard this, and smiled at the wrong guess they had made as to the cause of her misery. " But youVe quarrelled with them at home, I know," said the official. " Come, now, give me your parents' address, and let me write them a nice, dutiful, and penitent letter for you." " And let them know that their daughter is in rags, and beg- ging for a night's shelter at the asylum for the houseless I" And her lips worked convulsively in scorn at the proposal. "Are your friends in a position to assist you if they chose?" asked" one of the strangers. The woman grew impatient at the continued questionings, and looking at her interrogator said, reproachfully, " Oh ! can't you un- derstand that when decent persons are driven here they wish to keep their misery as secret as they can. If I had wanted to publish mine, I could have gone round the town, from door to door, with a petition filled with the whole particulars." The gentleman was taken aback by the answer. He stammered out some excuses, such as, " Really, you mistake me. Indeed, I am the last man to " Here the doctor and the superintendent drew near, and the latter observed, "She stated at the door that she has passed three entire nights in the streets — that she belongs to no trade or occupation — that she's twenty-three years old, and that her name is Katherine Merton." "I gave my mother's name," she cried, looking up as. she heard the last words. The officials and visitors retired a short distance from her, and con- sulted together. "From her manner and expression," said one, " it is plain she is respectably connected." "You can tell that from her features and face," observed another. " She is evidently in a state of great exhaustion from want, and in a highly nervous condition," remarked the doctor. "Indeed, I would advise that no more questions be asked her." The superintendent exclaimed, " "We have many such cases here in the course of the season— people in the last stage of destitution, whose friends are not only well-to-do, but occupy high positions in the country." It was at last agreed, at the doctor's suggestion, that the poor woman should be placed under the care of the house-matron, who should make her a cup of tea, whilst the doctor prepared for her a stimulating draught to recruit her sinking powers. In a few hours afterwards the noise and chattering of the boys below, and the gossip of the women above, as well as the squealing of the beggar-children in the nursery, had all ceased. The more tidy of the women, who had remained darning their gowns after they had c 2 20 PAVED WITH GOLD. taken them off for the night, had put their work away, and stowed their letters and other humble treasures in the locker under the wooden pillow at the head of their " bunks." The men had quitted the warm fire and crept one after another to their berths, where, rolled round in their leathers, they were sleeping as sound as squirrels in the winter. The buckets of chloride of lime had already been placed at intervals in the gangways to fumigate the wards ; the fires had been banked up for the night, and the gas-lights had been lowered, so that in the half light, as you moved about the silent, solemn place, and saw the rows of tightly-bound figures, brown and stiff as mum- mies, it seemed like wandering amidst some large catacomb. The stillness was broken only by the snoring of the sounder sleepers and the coughing of the more restless. It was a marvellously pathetic scene to contemplate. Here was a herd of the most wretched and friendless people in the world, lying down close to the earth as sheep ; here were some two centuries of outcasts, whose days are an unvarying round of suffering, enjoying the only moments when they are free from pain and care — life being to them but one long, painful operation, as it were, and sleep the chloroform which, for the time being, renders them insensible. The sight set the mind speculating on the beggars' and the out- casts' dreams. The ship's company, starving at the North Pole, dreamt, every man of them, each night, of feasting ; and was this miserable frozen-out crew now regaling themselves with visions of imaginary banquets ? — were they smacking their mental lips over ethereal beef and pudding ? "Was that poor wretch, whose rheumatic limbs rack him each step he takes — was he tripping over green fields with an elastic and joyous bound, that in his waking moments he can never know again ? Did that man's restlessness and heavy moaning come from nightmare terrors of policemen and treadwheels ? — and which among those runaway boys was fancying that he was back home again, with his mother and sisters weeping on his neck ? The next moment the thoughts shifted, and the heart was overcome with a sense of the heap of social refuse — the mere human street- sweepings — this great living mixen, that was destined, as soon as the spring returned, to be strewn far and near over the land, and serve as manure to the future crime crops of the country. Then came the self-congratulations and the self-questionings ; and as a man, sound in health and limb, walking through an hospital, thanks God that he has been spared the bodily ailments, the mere sight of which sickens him, so in this refuge fop the starving and the homeless, the first instinct of the well-to-do visitor is to breathe a thanksgiving, like the pharisee in the parable, that " he is not as one of these." But the vain conceit has scarcely risen to the tongue before the better nature whispers in the mind's ear, " By what special virtue of your own are you different from them ? How comes it that you are well clothed and well fed, whilst so many go naked and hungry ?" And if you, in your arrogance, ignoring all the accidents that have helped to build up your worldly prosperity, assert that you have been the "architect of your own fortune," who, let us ask, gave you the genius or energy for the work ? Then get down from PAVED WITH GOLD. 21 your moral stilts, and confess it honestly to yourself that you are what you are by that inscrutable grace which decreed your birthplace to be a mansion rather than a "padding-ken," or which granted you brains and strength, instead of sending you into the world a cripple or an idiot. It is hard for smug-faced respectability to acknowledge these dirt- caked, erring wretches as brothers, and yet, if from those to whom little is given little is expected, surely, after the atonement of their long suffering, they will make as good angels as the best of us. That night the superintendent, whilst going round the wards for the last time, said to the matron : " By-the-by ! about that young woman whom the policeman brought here ; how was she when she left ? Better— eh ?" " Oh, yes, she was much better — getting on very nicely, I may say," was the answer. " She had a comfortable hot cup of tea and a good warm beside the fire in my room — for I took her there, poor thing, she seemed so decent like. I gave her the shilling to get her bed with ; but she's as helpless as a child, and knows nothing about London ways." " Did she tell you anything more about who she was ?" asked the superintendent. " Yes, poor simple thing, she did," answered the dame ; " when she got well warm, she had a good cry at being in such a place ; and as I told her not to take on so, and that this world was only one of trial, she began to talk away as if her heart was full to bursting, and she was glad to find some one that she could tell her troubles to." " Well, and are her parents well off?" asked the male official. " Oh dear, yes," replied the dame ; " from all I could make out they seem to be very rich and very proud — a good deal like that black-haired girl's case that was here last winter — you know, the one that had gone off with the play-actor fellow. But she didn't seem to like to speak much about her home ; and do what I would I couldn't get the address out of her. All the time she was talking about her father's pride, I was saying to myself, 'You don't know it, poor thing, but you're every bit as proud yourself — a chip of the old block, as the saying goes — for she kept on protesting she'd rather die of starvation in the streets, than ever go home again." " It's very shocking to think of the pride of some people," observed the superintendent. " Ah !" sighed the dame, " we can none of us see the beam in our own eye." Then she went on, " I only got her story from her by bits, and all of a jumble like ; but what I gather is this : She was married when she was very young to an Indian officer, and when he died she came home a young widow thing, and had a good pension — enough, indeed, to keep her quite independent-like of her friends, though she went back to live among 'em." " Well, what has she done with it ?" asked the superintendent. "Wait a bit!" expostulated the dame; "you see this is how it came about, as far as I can guess. After she had been home some little while, she got to find the time hang heavy with her, and so 22 PAVED WITH GOLD. began to take lessons in French of one of those refugee fellows who had come and settled in her neighbourhood ; and then she got listen- ing to the Frenchman's palavering when she .ought to have been minding her learning, and the end of it was, there was a secret mar- riage between 'em, quite unbeknown to her friends." "Ah, I see!" cried the superintendent. "He was beneath her station, and she was afraid to let her family know the imprudent match she had made." " No, no ! you're too quick by half," said the matron. " That was only a small part of the reason, let me tell you, for her saying no- thing about the wedding. You see the pension she was entitled to as an officer's widow would have ceased directly it became known that - she had married again ; so, naturally wishing to preserve her independ- ence — for she knew her husband was too poor to maintain them both — she would not let even her most intimate bosom friend know of the marriage, lest it should creep out, and her pay be stopped at the India House." " And I suppose somebody found it out and went and informed the authorities ?" speculated the superintendent. "No; nothing of the kind," expostulated the dame. "Now you really must allow me to tell the story my own way. Well," continued the lady, sucking her mouth dry as if making ready for a long ora- tion, and crossing her forefingers, " things went on as I have told you without any one so much as dreaming of what had took place, until the poor dear found she was likely to become a motherland at last it got to be beyond the power of cloaks and shawls to hide her condi- tion. Then there was a tremendous to do !" "Dear me! dear me! I see it all!" cried the superintendent. " They turned her into the streets and shut their doors against her. Wasn't that it— eh?" # "Do have a little patience — pray !" interrupted the dame, annoyed at having the story " taken out of her mouth." " You shall know all in good time. Her father seems to have been as hasty as he was proud, and took up rash notions without inquiring whether they were true or not. Seeing her in the situation she was, and of course knowing nothing of the marriage, he began abusing her, and then and there called her a shameless hussy, and threatened to turn his back upon her." " But what a silly girl!" exclaimed the officer. " Why didn't she show the certificate of her marriage, and set it all straight at once ?" " How you talk! Didn't I tell you she was afraid of losing her pension if her marriage got abroad ? Besides, she was as proud every bit as her father was," answered the dame ; " and, what is more, she seems to have been quite as hasty, too ; for when he called her harsh names, her spirit was up. So, as she knew she had been properly married at the altar, and had a feeling that she was independent of her family so long as her pension wasn't stopped, she packed up her things, and oif she went, and lived with her husband, leaving her relations to think just what they chose." " Bless my soul !" explaimed the superintendent, " what mad things a person's silly spirit will lead one to do ! And she might have cleared PAYED WITH GOLD. 23 it all up by one little word. And just see what it has come to, now. Of course the French fellow ill-treated her after all ? for such matches seldom turn out well." " Ah ! poor dear, she's been punished enough for her headstrong doings," sighed the pitying matron. "What strange romances do turn up in this place to be sure ! "Well, as I was saying, she lived with her husband away from home, putting up with the jibes and taunts of the world for the sake of the man and the money that was to keep them from starvation ; for when I tell you she had been his only scholar, you may fancy his teaching business didn't bring in much to the home." " I should think not!" exclaimed the officer. ""Why, we've had plenty of foreigners here who would have been glad to give lessons in their language for a meal." "Well, it soon came out, poor thing! what the Frenchman had married her for," mournfully added the matron. " Of course Mr. Mounseer had heard my lady had got a pension to her back, before •ever he thought of making 3oyo to her ; and though, before the mar- riage, she had explained to him that she would lose every ha'penny she had if it ever came out that she was no longer a widow, yet they hadn't been man and wife a week, before she got to see plainly enough that the fellow didn't believe a word of what she had said to him, and fancied she had made up the story just to keep the money in her own hands." " Well, well ! there's never a "sin committed but the punishment is sure to follow," ejaculated the officer ; " and here it comes, I can see." " Even before she left her father's house," continued the matron, " this man kept on worrying her to let him go down and draw some of the money ; and he told her right out that he knew that as her hus- band he was entitled to whatever property she possessed. However, so long as she was at her father's he was a bit afraid to appear in his true character, and he was kept quiet by a sovereign now and then ; but no sooner had the noise took place and she gone to live with him entirely, than he threw off the double-faced mask of caring for anything but her money, and plainly said to her, in French, ' I ain't going to be bamboozled, my lady !' So what do you think ? why he takes all the money there is in the house at the time, and comes up to London, and walks straight to the India House, and there, showing the marriage lines as proof of his being her husband, demands that the pension should be paid only to him in future." "The mean hound!" the superintendent could not refrain from exclaiming. " But the fellow bit his fingers nicely, of course ; for such a step naturally put a stop to all money from that quarter." " Think, though, of what a blow it must have been to her, poor thing !" said the matron. " I'm sure I thought her heart would have broke before me, as she told me how she had given up father, home, and friends, for that man's sake, and how for him, too, she had put up with taunts and suspicions that are the hardest of all for a woman to bear ; and then for him to go away from her and leave her directly he found that his selfish blunderings had made a beggar of her ! I dare- 24 PAVED WITH GOLD. say, too, he was a good bit ashamed of himself, and didn't like to face her after what he had done." "Ah! not only that," interrupted the officer, "but it is clear enough he married her only for her money, so as soon as he found that there was none, why, of course my gentleman went off." " If you had only heard her tell it all to me, it would have made your eyes smart to see how she took on about the vagabond," said the kind-hearted matron. "The silly thing must have loved him, of course, or she wouldn't have made the sacrifices she had done on his account. Well, when she found he didn't return home, she began to think all sorts of things, and to get half crazy with his neglect of her, especially in the situation she was. Still she wouldn't allow herself to think bad of him, though she could hardly keep down the suspicions that came up in her mind. Well, she waited and waited, watching day and night for him to come back, and writing to him all manner of imploring things to get him home again, until at last she was fairly worn out ; and, as it was just upon the time for her to draw her pension, she borrowed a few shillings, and came to London herself." "And [found out how she had been used by the fellow," guessed the superintendent. " Yes, indeed !" continued the dame, tossing her head. " She hunted for him everywhere she could think of ; she went to all the places she had heard him talk about ; but he was nowhere to be found. Then, when quarter-day arrived, she set off to the India House to receive her pension ! and then, poor soul ! what a thunderclap the clerks had got to hurl at her. They taxed her with being married, and said they were surprised at her boldness in coming there when .she knew that her pension was forfeited." " Bless me, it must have been a blow to her to lose both money and husband the same afternoon, as it were," soliloquised the super- intendent. " But at least it had the effect of opening her eyes to the true character of the man." " When a woman takes to a man, it's wonderful how slow she is to think badly of him," moralised the matron. "This poor thing stayed in town, still hoping to meet with him somewhere, for she couldn't bring her mind to believe he had abandoned her. She lived on her things, one going after another, as we well know is the case with half the poor creatures who comes to us here, until at last all was gone, and she was turned out of her lodgings for rent." " Oh ! I've no patience with such folly," the officer exclaimed ; " why didn't she write home ?" The matron impatiently answered, " How can you say that, when you know we have had scores and scores here, who would sooner suffer all the agony of the sharpest hunger and cold, rather than humble themselves by confessing the degradation their folly and self-will had brought them to ? It's the fear of being taunted that does it." " And their own stupid, worldly pride, too," added the officer. " But if you come to think of it," remonstrated the dame, " it must be a dreadful struggle for those who have been well to do, to PAVED WITH GOLD. 25 bring themselves to write home to their friends and confess they are starving in the streets. To have to put our address to a letter is a terrible trial to stiff-necked people, even though they be in rags. Do all I could— though I'm sure I talked, and begged till my tongue was sore — I could not get that young woman to promise me she'd write as much as a dozen words to her friends. 'No, that she wouldn't,' she said, ' not even if it cost her her life !' I never set eyes on such stubbornness of spirit in all my born days." " Well, such people must pay the penalty of their own obstinacy," exclaimed the superintendent. "But did she say anything about calling again in the morning ? for those gentlemen that were here to- day seemed to take great interest in her case, and wished to know what could be done for her." "Indeed I couldn't get her to make any regular promise," was the answer ; " for though she didn't say she wouldn't come, still I'm sure she is too much afraid of our finding out who she is ever to show her face inside this asylum again." CHAPTEE IY. What a silent, dismal, deserted place is the City of London on a Sunday ! It reminds one of Defoe's description of the metropolis daring the plague, when every shop and house was closed and barred, and the citizens had fled to the suburbs. On no other day are you made so conscious that nobody lives there, for whilst in the other parts of the capital you catch, as you walk the streets after church, the savoury fumes of the Sunday's baked meats that men in clean shirt-sleeves are carrying steaming through the thoroughfares, here no " bakings are carefully attended to ;" and indeed, there is hardly a baker's shop to be seen, unless it be such as drive a light-luncheon trade in buns, and biscuits, and coffee, and which, though on week days they swarm with clerks thick as flies about a tart-tray, are now closed up as tight as strong rooms. Tou can tell now how few of the large blocks of houses are used as dwelling-places by the citizens, for there is scarcely a wreath of smoke issuing from the crowded stacks of chimneys, and the air is clear and unfogged with the sooty fumes, so that you are startled to be able to see from one end of Cheapside to the other, and wonder- struck to find that the roadway — which the day before was so blocked up with cabs, omnibuses, and vans, that you could almost have run along their roofs like a line of housetops — is now nearly as open to the view as a railway cutting. The pavements, too, that were yesterday black with their jostling, hurrying crowds, are now scarcely speckled by the few stragglers that saunter along them, whilst the one omnibus 26 PAVED WITH GOLD. that creeps lazily on its journey lias hardly a passenger in it, and has the whole street to itself as clear as a race- course. At the Old Bailey; where, on other days, the carts of the suburban carriers stand opposite the inn-yard, drawn up like a row of bathing- machines, the cocks and hens are out in the roadway scratching up the litter as in a farmyard ; and farther down, in front of the Criminal Court, where, at other times, the entrance-door and the neighbouring public-houses are thronged with troops of witnesses and suspicious- looking prisoners' friends waiting the results of the trials within, now the pigeons walk unscared along the causeway, pecking the dust as they strut along ; neither is there any longer here a smell of hot boiled beef, nor a cloud of steam issuing through the area-rails of the adjoining eating-house, for the shutters are up there, and the linen- jacketed man that, in a state of perpetual perspiration, carves the ruddy rounds — big as butchers' -blocks — behind the window, is now away airing himself, maybe, in the river's breeze upon the halfpenny boat. "Where are the colonies of clerks that yesterday you noted filling the dining-rooms in Bucklersbury, or feasting on their " half steak" at Joe's, Ned's, Sam's, or any other of the familiar tribe of Christian- named chophouse-keepers ? — where the army of porters and ware- housemen that worked at each block of buildings round about St. Paul's, peopling every floor as thickly as sailors do the decks of a merchantman ? — where the colony of bankers, merchants, factors, and brokers that gobbled their soup at Birch's, or took their sandwiches and sherry at the South American, or teased their stomachs with the cream-tufted tarts at Purcell's ? The Bay-tree, too, is closed, and not a City man stands eating his shilling snack " hot with vegetables" at the counter ; the Lombard- street taverns, moreover, with their por- tions of pink pickled salmon spotting their pewter bars, have put up the chain and locked their doors, whilst the proprietors have driven out in their light "shay" traps to drink tea at Hampstead, Kew, or Harrow. As you walk along the deserted streets, and glance up at each floor, you never see a human head at the windows ; nothing, indeed, but piles of goods, as if the shops had started to the upper stories as in a pantomime trick. The iron venetian-blind-like shutters are down before every shop-window, ribbed as the sail of a Chinese junk, while before them slants the daylight reflector, casting its patch of brilliance vainly on the closed shop fronts. It is almost impossible to recognise Thames-street again, for the wharves along the river-side have the gates all closed, except where the little wicket is left ajar ; and down the yards of some of these you can see the huge empty waggons, with their thick shafts turned back and" pointing high in the air. Here, too, the cranes, that on a week-day project like iron gibbets from every floor, are turned on one side, in the same manner as the crutch for the bottle-jack is bent back to the chimney-piece when the roast- ing has ceased. The carts no longer block the road, nor are there huge bales dangling, like monster money-spiders from a thread, and swinging in the air. At the Coal Exchange, the only thing PAYED WITH GOLD. 27 stirring is the weathercock, and the office desks, seen through the windows of the floors above, look as deserted as those in a schoolroom during the holidays. On the other side of the way, Billingsgate is lonely and empty, and has a dreary, cloister-like stillness about it ; and where but lately the air rang with a positive Babel of voices, you can now hear a whistle echo against the metallic roofing of the broad, expansive shed. The benches and stalls are packed on top of one another, like old discarded tables in a lumber room ; and as you look down into the basement through the square opening in the paving, that seems like the hatchway to a ship, you see the huge empty shell- fish tubs, giving the place the look of a large laundry out of work, rather than being the periwinkle and whelk portion of the market. Now step down to the floating-pier and see what a change the day of rest has made in the traffic of the river, as well as the shore. So doubly silent is " the silent highway," that the birds chirping among the Old Exchange statues at Nicholson's wharf sound as noisy as the aviary at the Pantheon. There is not the flutter of a paddle-wheel, nor the roar of the escape-pipe to a newly-arrived steamer to be heard ; but the rushing of the tide chafing against the bridge piers gurgles in the ears, broken only by the barking of the curs — noisy as alarums — that are left alone on board the lighters to guard such as are moored close to the shore. There is " no admission for visitors" at the docks on Sunday, and the big gates are closed, so that the little side door alone is left ajar for the ingress and egress of seamen, whilst the alphabetic warehouses seem still, moody, and closely barred as hulks ; and in the unfre- quented roadway outside the walls, a gang of young thieves from the purlieus of Eosemary-lane are playing " chuck ha'penny" without the chancy of a passing waggon to interrupt their game. Even money, too, seems idle on the day of rest. The Bank of England, squat as a cash-box, looks positively as if it were " to let," and you expect to see bills posted up at the various corners announc- ing the forthcoming sale of " the valuable effects." The coffers of the world now seem to be closed as a worked-out mine, and you wonder whether the great draining engine of five per cent, has ceased work- ing or not. "Who passes his Sunday within this citadel of wealth ? If you were to pull the bell, would anybody answer it ? Who ever saw the Bank of England servant taking in the milk ? or a butcher's cart or baker's truck waiting at the area gate, even on a week day ? Is the man who guards the building on the Sunday twin-brother to the keeper of Eddy stone. Lighthouse ? and is he too left there for four weeks at a time to wander alone about the desolate place ? "Where have the silver-haired, prim-looking bankers of the de- serted Lombard-street flown to ? and where are the Exchange men that but yesterday crowded the quadrangle ? Look through the iron gates and you will see the poor statue of Queen Yictoria as lonely as a scarecrow in a corn-field, and the whole place as desolate as ruins after a fire. Then London Bridge, the main duct of all the metropolitan traffic, where policemen, like dyke inspectors in Holland, are stationed to see that the great commercial tides setting in from Middlesex and 28 PAVED WITH GOLD. Surrey flow on quietly without breaking down the restrictions of the City ; this immense thoroughfare is now so clear of vehicles that fathers walk with their children in the roadway ; and on the other side of the water, so completely has the business of the week ceased, that a street-seller has erected her stall on the entrance-steps of " Hibebnia Chambers," and the piled-up oranges, ranged in little pyramids, like golden cannon-balls, rest against the closed massive doors; for the hop-merchants that rent the offices of the palatial building have forgotten all about their " pockets" for a time, and left the chances of " cent, per cent." to the fruit- woman. As you enter the narrow passages of Leadenhall-market, you startle maybe some bone-grubber, carrying a rush hand-basket, and who seems to have been taking advantage of the solitude of the Sabbath to purloin a slice of meat from the two or three carcases that are left hanging in the open space. Here, too, the long rows of unoccupied butchers' hooks seem like the hat-pegs at a bankrupt railway hotel, and the narrow arcades of shops, with their shutters up, have the appearance of some deserted Indian bazaar. Not a footfall is heard upon the pavement, and the piano at the licensed game- dealer's, jingling forth the 100th Psalm, fills the place, like an empty room, with its sounds. Indeed, go where you will — to "Whitechapel shambles, or the Temple — walk down Cannon-street, Barbican, or Bishopsgate — or visit the busiest of the public offices, such as the Post-office or the India House — all is as quiet and deserted as if it were some two or three hours after midnight, rather than only an hour or two after noon; so that you might fancy you were wandering through the sleeping city of the fairy tale, and that all the bankers, merchants, and brokers, as well as their attendant army of clerks, shopmen, and porters, were slumbering in their chambers, as if spell-bound with the magic trance. But if the streets appear thus desolate to those who welcome the Sabbath as a day of rest and home retirement — how fearfully lonely and sad must the City seem to the poor creatures who, without a shelter to hide in, are forced to wander out the day, waiting impa- tiently for the night to come and screen their wretchedness with its darkness. On this day, when even the humble manage to put on clean linen, and unshorn beards have entirely disappeared, how shame-stricken and heart-broken do those wretched beings seem who have to shuffle along the pavements in their every-day rags, wearing the one dust-coloured suit of tatters that even on the week day made the passers-by shrink from them with the fear of contact. f There was one miserable soul who crept along the forsaken path- ( ways, seeking only those streets where the warehouses lay the thickest, and glancing down each turning before she entered it, to make cer- tain that she would meet with none better clad than herself. Occa- sionally she rested for awhile in the corners of gateways or crouched ton steps with her head on her knees, remaining motionless as if in a deep slumber. After paying for her night's lodging she had eked out what was left of the shilling she had received at the asylum for the houseless, PAVED WITH GOLD. 29 eating only when her hunger grew painful, and allowing herself scarcely more than the rations dealt out to a shipwrecked crew. She felt hourly that her strength was failing her, and that both reason and body were giving way with her pangs. In the early morning — for the night had been passed dozing in a coffee-shop — she had crawled about the "West-end ; but as the day ad- vanced, and the cleanly-dressed people began to stir abroad, she had .gradually crept away before them, and so reached the lonely City. Whilst the crowds were flocking to church she hid herself down mews, and when the bells had ceased ringing she slunk forth again, and stole cautiously into one of those odd, out-of-the-way City churches, with a burial-ground like a back garden up a court, and whose congregation is always about as numerous as the audience to a scientific lecture at a mechanics' institution. Here she slided to the least conspicuous of the free seats and tried to pray, but the place was warm to drowsiness, and tired and faint as she was, the hum of the organ lulled her to sleep. It had thawed during the day, but as the night came on, the sky grew clear and starry and the air keen and frosty, so that in a few hours the pavements were a sheet of glass, and the lumps of mud as hard and sharp as the slag of a foundry. The street slush had, during her Sun- day's pilgrimage, oozed through the gaps and holes in her burst boots, and as the cold of the night returned, her wet stockings froze to her chilled feet and wounded them at each step she took. Now she had not even a penny left to pay for the cup of coffee that would have entitled her to a short slumber at the night houses with her head upon the table. She counted each hour through the night, as does a sick person restless with a fever, and heard the hun- dred steeples of the City chiming the time, in the darkness and chill of the early morning, until she thought the sunlight would never come again. As the air seemed to grow colder than ever at the fag-end of the night, and the streets had long been rid of the few remaining brawlers, leaving her the only wanderer through them, she grew more wretched and desperate than ever. Driven by the policemen from door-step to door-step, and finding that she was not allowed to sit, much less sleep, in the thoroughfares, she began to think it better to end such a life as hers, and sauntered on, shuddering, to- wards the river. But when there, the water was like a sheet of steel, and looked so witheringly cold as her mantle flew open in the nipping breeze, that her timid resolves took flight, and she felt she lacked the courage, even though heart-broken and half-frozen as she was, for such a death as that. So on she wandered again, half sleeping as she walked, and trying to find some hidden corner where, unseen by the policeman, she might doze against the wall, until at length the reviving bustle of the market carts roused her from her stupor, and she was filled with hopes, almost as faint and comfortless as the cold morning light, that some lucky accident might happen to her in the coming day. How that day was lived, through it is difficult to tell. The poor soul had already been thirty odd hours adrift in the streets without 30 PAVED WITH GOLD. food or sleep, or even "rest. Still, while the daylight lasted, and London was alive with the rattle of its traffic, she staggered along, borne faintly up by the continual excitement of the passing throngs, and feeling still a half presentiment that she would meet with her husband somewhere among the crowd. But when she saw another night beginning to dusk the air, and the lines of street-lamps starting one after another into strings of light, she felt no longer faint and torpid, but grew positively furious with the frenzy of the thought of passing another such a time in the streets. Moreover, the sky was overcast, and the half-melted snow- flakes fell now in a shower of sleet, that, as it beat against the face, stung the skin with the sharp splinters of ice mixed with the rain. Then, more terrible than all, she began to feel that another life besides her own was at stake, and to be roused with all the madness of maternal instinct lest any danger should befal her child. "Whither could she crawl to hide her head at such an hour ? What place would open its doors to receive her ? She had been turned from the workhouse, and dismissed with a shilling from the last haven of all — the asylum for the houseless. It was no time for seeking shelter as a charity : she must have it, even -though it be adjudged to her as a punishment. It had been refused her as an act of mercy to herself; it should now be forced upon her as an act of justice to others. The first thought was to do as she had read of women doing when rendered as desperate as herself; and, stung by the anguish of, the moment, she seized a stone from the newly-macadamised road, and was about to fling it at the first street lamp. But then came the thought that perhaps the authorities might take pity on her for so trifling an offence ; so, turning round, she flung the stone with all her remaining strength at the first brilliantly-lighted window that caught her sight, and shattered a huge sheet of plate glass — as big as a mas- querade posting-bill — that adorned the showy front of a neighbouring shawl and mantle warehouse. At the sound of the crash and rattle of the glassy fragments, a crowd of shopmen rushed into the street ; and on the woman confessing herself the offender, it was but the work of a moment to hand her over to the police, whilst the enraged proprietor vowed " that if it cost him a hundred pounds, she should have three months of it." And the tradesman was true to his word. CHAPTEE V. THE RELEASE. " "What, Simcox, my boy, who'd have thought of seeing you ?" " Bless my heart ! why it's Mr. Nathan, as I live !" These gentlemen met outside Tothill-fields Prison. Mr. Simcox, of the firm of Simcox, Son, and Nicholls, had his hand on the prison knocker, ready to lift the two hundred-weight of metal, when the ap- proaching figure of Mr. Nathan, of Lyon's Inn, startled him from his purpose. • «** PAVED WITH GOLD. 31 "This is the very last place where I should have thought of meeting you !" exclaimed that ornament to his profession, Simcox. " And I certainly never expected to see you here," returned the buckish Israelite. "If it a'n't impertinent, may I. ask what brings you to these parts?" " Well, do you know, I was just going to put the same question to you?" " Oh, I've come about a poor woman who has got into trouble." " Ha, ha ! and my case is with a female too." " The girl Tve come about is here in the name of Katherine Katherine — let me see — what's her other name ?" " It isn't Merton, is it ? Tor that's the one I want." " Dear me ! this is strange. That's the very party I'm after, sure enough." " How remarkably odd ! If it's a fair question, who are you concerned for ?" " Oh, certainly — without prejudice, you know ! I come here on, the part of the husband." "The husband! He's a Frenchman, isn't he? Used to teach languages, I. think? Well,. I'm instructed by the family — very old clients of mine, and highly respectable people." " And wkat do they want to do with the girl ?" " I really don't think I should, like to go so far as to answer that question." " I don't see that it can prejudice your case at all, for I am quite decided as to the course J shall pursue." " I tell you what," proposed Simcox, " you tell me. and I'll tell you — that's fair." "Without prejudice, of course?" " Certainly ! Well, I have come here to pay the fine, and release her." "You surely must be joking — that's just my errand." " Bless my heart, you don't say so ! And what do you propose to do with her when you get her out ?" " Well, as we are to be frank, the husband wishes to have her sent over to France to him. He has taken a singing coffee-house — a cafe shontong, as they call it — and " " Ah, I see ; and he thinks, as Katherine is a pretty girl, she'd look well sitting behind those portions of lump sugar, and taking the money for him." " And what does the father mean to do with her, eh ?" " Why, I am to send her down to an aunt of hers in the country, and I believe she is to be despatched to Australia." " Tou speak as if you were sure to have her. Tou forget the hus- band has a prior claim." " We deny the marriage !" " And we are in a position to prove it. I have a copy of the certificate among the papers that my client has sent me." " Nonsense ! that fellow was villain enough to forge any document." " I tell you it was a oonafide marriage." "Pooh! pooh!" 32 PAVED WITH GOLD. " I intend to claim the woman on behalf of the husband." " And I shall go in with you and serve the prison authorities with notice, that if they deliver her up to you, they'll do so at their peril." " Well, well, we needn't quarrel about it here." And so saying, Mr. Nathan gave a heavy knock at the door. In a moment the ponderous gateway was open, and the two soli- citors were ushered into the clerk's office at the side. Both, in their impatience, began shouting at the same time, " I've called to pay the fine " " One at a time, gentlemen," interfered the steady-going clerk. " In the case of Katherine Merton," said Mr. Simcox. "I give you notice that you do not hand over the body to Mr. Nathan here " " And I have come to give you similar notice not to part with her to this gentleman ; I claim her on behalf of the husband." " And I deny that there is any husband at all, and come here on the part of the father." " Come gentlemen, you needn't quarrel about it," said the clerk, solemnly, "neither husband nor father can claim her now." " She hasn't been released ?" asked the lawyers in one breath. The clerk answered, gravely, " She was buried this morning." " Grood Heavens !" cried Mr. Simcox, starting back. "Dear me! what an awful thing!" said Nathan, turning pale. " "We have no power now, Simcox, so we had better go and have a glass of sherry together, for the shock has made me feel quite faint." j They were about to quit the office, when the clerk called after them : " By-the-by, gentlemen, there's a baby — a little boy — that Katherine Merton has left behind her. "What are we to do with him!" " Boy!" they both exclaimed, as they stared at one another. Then Simcox said : " Oh, he belongs to the husband, clearly !" "Husband!" exclaimed Nathan. "Why, you denied the mar- riage just now. He'd better be sent home to his mother's family. Couldn't be in better hands, I'm sure." " Well, gentlemen," said the clerk, " settle it amicably between you ; which shall we hand the infant over to ?" " Oh, I've no instructions on the matter." " And I'm sure I've none." y*T " I am 'certain my clients are of too high standing in the world to countenance any child of sin born under such disgraceful circum- stances !" exclaimed the moral Simcox. " And I expect my client," tittered the wily Nathan, " will be only too glad to get rid of the burden." " But will you leave the addresses of your clients, gentlemen," asked the clerk, " so that we may communicate with them ?" Both the lawyers seemed to consider such a proceeding perfectly unnecessary, and precipitately left the prison. Now what fate, reader, think you, would be likely to await a being born under such circumstances, and in such a place ? To what end is such a beginning likely to lead ? Is such a one likely to find the streets of London " paved with gold ?" PAVED WITH GOLD. 33 2Sooit fyt JTtrst YOUNG WORKHOUSE AND FATHER PARISH. CHAPTER I. "dragged u p." An individual, costumed in a fashion which partook of the conjoint characters of the police-inspector, the railway-guard, and the half-pay officer, jerked at the long dangling bell-pull, beside the gate of a large building, the architecture of which was of that non-ornate, government-establishment, contract style peculiar to hospitals, pri- sons, mad-houses, factories, and barracks. That individual was a prison-warder, and that building a workhouse — the workhouse of "St. Lazarus "Without." y/ " The House" — as all the poor in the neigbourhood called it, speak- ing of it as if there was no other house in the entire parish worthy of consideration, and always prefixing the definite article to it, as mer- chants talk of " the Bank" when referring to any of the places of business belonging to Messrs. Coutts, Drummond, Hoare, Twining, Rogers, and Co. — the House, we repeat, was of the true parochial pattern, such as may be seen in almost any quarter of the metro- polis. Had it not been for its high outer wall, it might have been mistaken for an hospital ; but for its want of bars before the windows, it might have been supposed to be a prison : if it had only had a tall chimney- shaft, the stranger in London might have come to the conclusion that it was an extensive factory ; or a couple of sentries pacing in front of it, and a few pairs of regimental trousers drying outside the windows, would have convinced the visitor from a garrison town in the country that it was some barracks. The little square wicket in the gate was opened, and a round, red face appeared behind the gridiron-like bars. The eyes of the face twinkled again as they glanced at the prison-arms on the warder's stand-up collar, and the mouth was seen to expand into a grin as its owner said : " Now then, what's up ? You a'n't come after any of our chaps, hare you ?" The prison officer felt somewhat piqued that the "parish" should D 34 PAVED WITH GOLD. presume to address the " county" in so trifling a tone, and answered as sharply as if he had been on drill — " Letter from the guv'nor." The gate was unlocked, and, when the warder had passed through, a woman carrying a child was about to follow, whereupon the work- house porter thrust her back, saying : " Now, young 'ooman, where's your rorder ?" "A' right!" cried the turnkey, with true official elision. "One of our female warders. Tou're to receive the body of this here baby," he added, as he nodded at a long roll of clothes that the woman was carrying under her mantle. Now, if the male official had been roused at the porter's want of proper respect for his superiors, the female one — who wore the full uniform of blue-trimmed bonnet and green-plaid cloak, distinctive of a prison-matron — grew positively crimson with indignation at the idea of being mistaken for an applicant for relief. She felt, however, that it was beneath her as an " officer," who had been " many years in the service," to bandy words with a workhouse porter, much as she might have been inclined to tell him u a bit of her mind." Inside the workhouse-gate the Union character of the place was as unmistakable as the Union Jack itself. Close beside the gateway was the little square cottage of a porter's lodge, placed there like a huge dog -kennel to guard the entrance. The big, brawny old soldier who did duty as gate-keeper, had evidently been chosen with a view to the overawing of " sturdy vagrants;" and though display- ing but little softness in his nature, exhibited an odd fancy for pigeons and singing birds ; for against his door-post a lark hopped about upon a few square inches of turf, and the room inside the lodge was as chirrupy as a barber's shop with its cages of linnets and goldfinches, whilst the pigeons strutting about the large, bare, gra- velled court-yard — as pompous and gorgeous as beadles — belonged also to the official. Across the yard was the big entrance-hall, where rows of black leathern fire-buckets dangled from the ceiling, as at an insurance office ; and once within this, the true character of the building was made apparent to every sense. The nose could sniff pauperism in the smell of bread and gruel which pervaded the air. The eye read helplessness and poverty-stricken dependence in the crook-backed old figures, tottering about, as if palsied with weakness, in their suits of iron-grey ; whilst the ear recognised the same tale in the mumbling, wheezy voices, the asthmatic coughs, and the occasional shouting of the hale officials into the ears of the half-fatuous inmates — for all about the place were " so hard of hearing" that they had to use their hand as an ear-trumpet when spoken to. To' cross that workhouse threshold was to step, as it were, into another country, peopled only by beings in their second childhood ; and the sight of such a multitude of old creatures, toddling along with all the ricketiness of babyhood, set the mind wondering how so many shaky greybeards — for all were far older and weaker than any seen abroad in the streets — could ever have been collected together. It was, indeed, a perfect museum of old age, where every variety of de- crepitude might be noted and studied. A few of the inmates went PAYED WITH GOLD. 35 staggering across the sanded floors, propped on two sticks ; others sat out on the yard-benches in the spots where the sun fell, hoping to add a little heat to their expiring fires ; and many of these had white nightcaps showing under their hats, as though they were always ready for sleep, and fully prepared for the last long nap of all. The prison officials were ushered by a trembling old pauper " mes- senger" — who, by virtue of his office, had been promoted to the dignity of an entire suit of cords, and looked not unlike a superannuated charity boy — into the deserted board-room, where they were left for a while to scan the " regulations concerning disorderly and refractory paupers," or to study the " dietary tables," or else to pore over the maps that hung round the room as thickly as show-boards at a railway station. They had also time to contemplate the portrait of " Makoaeet Fle- ming," who, as the inscription said, " died in this workhouse, aged 103 ;" as well as to reckon, by the number of mahogany chairs drawn up in single file along the walls, how many guardians were in the habit of sitting, on full board days, round that ample green-baize-covered, horse-shoe table, which, with the high-backed chair standing alone at the upper end of it, seemed to fill the entire place. In a few minutes the master entered with Hm -governor's letter open in his hand. He looked at the baby, whose little chin the female warder was now busy tickling, in the hopes of coaxing it into a smile, and said : " Oh, that's the child, is it ? It seems healthy enough ! No skin disease, eh ?" " It's as beautiful a baby as ever was born, bless its little heart !" answered the female officer, as she continued to fondle the infant; " and has all its limbs straight, thank goodness." " The governor tells me here that its name is Philip Merton," proceeded the master, glancing at the note. "Yes; Merton was the name the mother was in by," replied the woman; " and an exceedingly well-conducted person she was." The master went on reading the letter, speaking aloud as he did so : " * The mother died in prison of puerperal fever,' — ah ! — very good — 'four days after the birth of the child,' — dear me! sad case — very good — 'can't say whether married or not,' — hem — ah! very good — \ reason to suppose the relations of t the mother are well off,' — so — so, indeed — very good — ' but no clue as to their name, or where- abouts.' Tut ! tut ! how unfortunate ; well, we must see whether we can find 'em out, and make them pay for the maintenance of the child." Then opening the door, he cried out : " Here, Hogsflesh, ask the matron to be good enough to step. this way." "When that lady made her appearance, a conversation took place as to whether any of the mothers then in the Union could be found willing to nurse the child in addition to her own. The matron ran over the names of several, and at last said : " There'jB Mary Hazlewood ! I'm sure her little Bertha is no drag upon such a strong, healthy woman as she is; and she'd be glad enough to take the boy, I dare say, for the allowance of beer and meat she'd get by it." D 2 36 PAYED WITH GOLD. The conversation was suddenly brought to a close by Hogsflesh again appearing at the door, and saying, as he thrust his head in : " Please, there's three ounces of wine wanted for the infirmary — and quick, please." It was, therefore, rapidly settled that the proposition should be made to the before-mentioned strong and healthy woman, and the female warder took her parting kiss at the plump cheeks of the unconscious little outcast, prattling to it in childish language the while; and even though it was fast asleep, telling it that they would all come and see it, and bring it some nice playthings as soon as it was old enough to use them. In a short while afterwards the hungry little Philip was butting his head like a young lamb against the side of Mary Hazlewood, whilst his pauper foster-sister was put to suck her fist and sprawl in the workhouse cradle at the foot of the woman. His prison baby- clothes had been exchanged for the blue-and-white-striped frock and the duster-like checked pinafore, composing the workhouse infant suit. The " mothers' ward" (for so the room allotted to the women with infants was calL_~ -i^ contradistinction to " the nursery," which was set aside for such children only as were old enough to be taken from the breast) was a kind of outhouse at the back of the " women's side" of the building. The yard which led to it was appropriated at once to exercising and the drying of the pauper linen. The ward itself was a cleanly-looking, whitewashed room, of the size of a three-stall stable, with a raftered roof showing above. There was a strong smell of babies and babies'-food pervading the place. On the hobs of the fireplace were rows of saucepans and tin pannikins to keep up a constant supply of warm pap ; and the rails of the high, guard-like fender were hung with an array of lilliputian linen, such as shirts, hardly bigger than sheets of note-paper — socks, but little larger than thumb-stalls — and coloured frocks, of about the same size as the squares of chintz in a patchwork counterpane. The room seemed positively crowded with cradles, for they were ranged along the wall in lines like so many tiny boats drawn up on a beach. Some of the little pauper infants were propped up in their cradles, amusing themselves with the rude playthings that the mothers had invented to quiet them. One had a rag-doll ; another was thumping a tin plate, and crowing at the sound it made ; and a third was rattling some pebbles in one of the pannikins. A few of the mothers, with their babes in their arms, were walking up and down the room, endeavouring to send them to sleep by patting their backs, and hissing the while as a groom does when rubbing down a horse; and others were seated on the benches with their infants in their laps, jogging them on their knees to allay the fretfulness of teething, whilst the poor little ones sat with their dimpled fists half down their mouths, or else biting at their mother's finger as it rubbed their swollen gums. Yet many of the pauper mothers, despite the wretched character of the place, were playing with their little ones, though hardly enter- ing into the baby games. One, as she leaned back on the form, was 1 PAYED WITH GOLD. 87 teaching a bare-legged, half-dressed little thing to walk along her knees and body up " Mammy's-hill ;V and another kept dabbing her hand over her babe's mouth, in order to make it babble like the bleating of a young lamb ; whilst a third was tickling her little one's fat neck, and digging her fingers into the rolls of flesh, till it cooed and gurgled again with infantine delight. And yet there was a melancholy about the maternal fondling at the pauper nursery that contrasted forcibly with such scenes in the homes even of the poorest outside the Union walls. Not only were no lullaby songs heard there, but every woman in the place was satisfied that bitter misfortune, rather than any imprudence of her own, had brought her to " the house," so that there was a gloom of misery and persecution over all ; and, indeed, they talked among themselves of little else than the neglect, trials, and privations they had endured before coming to the Union. Those who were married among the number told either how they had been deserted by their husbands, or how their homes had been broken up by ill-health or want of employment. One recounted how her husband, who was a field-labourer, went out for a holiday, and she had never "set eyes on him since;" another explained how overwork had ruined her good man's health, saying that " the hours with his light cart at the railway was too many for him." The un- married mothers, too, had all the same tale of neglect and broken promises to tell. As at a debtors' prison, indeed, the inmates, one f' J and all, protested their ruin had been brought about by no failing of their own. One of the most melancholy and pathetic features of the pauper nur- sery, too, was the very innocence of the babes, which in any other place would have charmed you ; for, as j'ou were startled to see the mothers apparently settled down to the wretchedness of the Union, rather than being heart-broken with shame at the thought of being disco- vered in such a home, so you were shocked and pained to find the little ones laughing and playing with their workhouse toys, unconscious of the degradation of their lot. Nor could you help pitying the wretched mothers themselves. You knew that it is but mothers' instinct, even for the vilest, to wish their offspring to be other than themselves — for every woman, however lost to worldly pride, is at least ambitious for her child, and would, if she had her will, have it begin life at the very topmost " rung" of the ladder : what wormwood, then, must it be to her soul to find him beaten down, as here, to the very dust, even before the battle of life has begun, and degraded to the lowest ranks ere he has done anything to forfeit his honour. The life of a workhouse infant has as little variety connected with it as that of a lighthouse keeper. The days of little Philip Merton , came one after another, and were as similar in appearance as those in a new diary, without an event worth noting to fill up the blank. Even the old mill-horse is said to have enjoyed the pleasing relaxation of turning the other way on the Sabbath, but to the Union babies Sunday brought no difference to the week's monotony of periodical pap and gruel. True, Sunday was white pinafore day, and there were m PAVED WITH GOLD. no clothes then hanging to dry in the exercising yard; and the workhouse chapel organ, too, might be* heard droning across the yard, about as loud as the hum of a bumble-bee among the flowers : but although the mothers told the children to " listen to the music," they none of them, poor things ! knew what music was — for not even an itinerant hurdy-gurdy was ever heard within the walls of St. Lazarus Without ; nor had they ever seen a bumble-bee ; nor, indeed, a flower (as nothing grew in that small Sahara of a gravelled yard) ; neither was any living animal seen within the Union gates, beyond the tabby cat out of the " old women's ward." But the workhouse babes could not even enjoy the sports peculiar to infancy, such as thrusting in their dolls' eyes, or sucking the tail of a sucking-pig; for in St. Lazarus' s. Union the dolls' eyes were stitched in black thread upon the rag faces ; and such delicacies as sucking-pigs had never been heard of as forming part of the work- house rations — even within the memory of Margaret Fleming herself, who died, as we have said, aged 103. Mary Hazlewood, with her two infants, had so much to do, that tne days passed anything but slowly with her. By the time night came round and she had the children cleanly dressed for bed — for the washings were as regular as the meal hours — and cuddling one another in their cradle, she was glad to sit down quietly beside them, and darn their tiny workhouse clothes ; and then, as she saw their hair mixing together on the pillow, she would declare that she was getting to like that dear Phil almost as much as her Bertie, though it wasn't doing right to her own flesh and blood. The woman, indeed, belonged to a better class. Her husband had been a seafaring man, and had gone out one morning — after a few words, when rather the worse for liquor — to look for a ship, but had never returned ; and whether he had deserted her, or stumbled over the dock's side, she had been unable to learn. The birth of her child had forced her into the workhouse ; but here she had conducted herself so much to the satisfaction of the matron that, on the death of the old woman who looked after the children in the upper nursery, she was installed as nurse to the family of little two-year-old out- casts. By the time Philip had reached his second year, and had been transferred to the upper nursery, he had, thanks to his foster-mother, grown into a plump, healthy-looking child, and so fat, too, that he had mere creases for joints and dimples for knuckles. His hair was light- brown, while his skin was pinky and transparent, so that it had often been a debate with the mothers in the ward, as to whether he would grow up fair or dark. He was still too young for his features to have any distinct mark about them ; nor did* they bear as yet any trace of his father having been a foreigner ; though, perhaps, he was quicker in his temper and more sudden in his affections than any of his little playmates. He was a great favourite among the women, from his pretty fresh colour ; and the matron, in her rounds, often pinched his cheeks as she went by, and called him her little pet, with the long, dark eyelashes. The occasional visits, too, of the female warders from the prison, PAYED WITH GOLD. 39 served to throw, not only an importance, but a sympathy, about the little fellow ; for it soon got bruited about that his mother had once been "a lady," and had died in prison after days of destitution in the streets. Thus he got to be the most petted of all the pauper children ; and if ever he toddled to the other side of the yard, and paid a visit to the old women's ward, there was almost a quarrel among the aged crones there as to who should have him on her knee, or hold the cat for him to stroke and pull about. And even when he went over there with " sister Bertie," as he was taught to call her, the ounce papers of brown sugar allowed to the poor old creatures were brought out more as a grand feast for " Phil" than to please the little girl. There were some fifteen wretched little pauper children in the nursery. There was little Annie Inwards, who had neither father nor mother — and there was Susey Collins, whose father had been killed at the railway — and Billy Thompson, whose three little brothers were in the Union also, but had been sent to the infirmary for ill health — and Tommy Liddle, whose aunt wouldn't keep him any longer — and ten or eleven others, all with some wretched story, which affected everybody but themselves almost to tears. But among* the number there were two for whom little Phil had very different feelings. The one was Emma Dixon, a big girl of eight, I whose mother wasn't " right in her head," and wouldn't let her go to school ; and her the little fellow was almost as much afraid of as he was taken with poor blind Willie, who had come out of " Pancridge Union," as the women called it, and who had no other name that they knew of. But this one, after Sister Bertha, he loved better than all the rest — though he hardly knew why. When a mere baby, Phil had been attracted towards the blind boy by the strange, wandering, upturned look of his dead opaque eyes, and next to the cat, Willie's eyes were the most curious sight for him in the place ; so he would sit and watch the restless, useless eyeballs, and as they seemed to turn back into the head, ask a thousand childish questions of the afflicted little orphan. When any strangers or guardians came to see the Union, Nurse Hazlewood, as they called her now, and who had grown as fond as a hen of her brood, would show their little chubby legs and arms to prove they were " all well taken care of," impressing upon the visi- tors that they were as "sweet and clean as a new pink" — and to do the woman justice, she was as continually cleaning her little ones as a cat does her kittens. Eor three years Phil stopped in the workhouse, till, in his little j mind, it was not only a home but an entire world to him. Seldom did his walks extend beyond the limits of the exer.cising-ground, so \ that he had no knowledge of nature, or hardly of mankind. So en- tirely had his little life, indeed, been hemmed in by the Union walls, that he grew up with a notion that there were only two classes of people in the world — paupers and guardians; and, consequently, when he and the other little ones were allowed, as a great treat, to go out for a walk with Nurse Hazlewood, he would call every well- dressed man that passed " a guardy," whilst every respectable dame he pointed at as a " matey" — the nursery name for matron. ■ 40 PAYED WITH GOLD. Nor had the little fellow any more vivid idea as to the necessity of working in order to live. He had seen day after day go hy and some three or four hundred people regularly supplied with food without the least exertion on their part : and he had got to fancy that nature sent breakfasts and suppers in the same way as she did light and darkness. The only work of which he had any notion was washing and cooking ; for he had often been into the laundry on one side of the yard, and it was a favourite amusement of his to peep down into the kitchen and watch the big cauldrons of gruel being stirred. Ac- cordingly, the men he had seen working when out on his walks he had fancied to be playing. Though, too, he had never asked himself or any one else where bread or gruel came from, it is almost certain that if he had been hard pushed on the subject, the boy would have shown there was some vague idea lingering in his mind that quartern loaves were obtained in the same manner as the paving-stones he had seen dug up out of the roads ; whilst gruel, no doubt, he thought to be as easily collected in tubfuls as the rain-water they caught for the washing. As for money, he had never even heard the chink of it, and had a shilling been shown to him, he would probably have taken it for one of the Union metal buttons. \J "When little Philip had turned his third year, it came to the time when he must quit the Union for the pauper farm-schools in the suburbs. Little Bertha was to go with him, but blind "Willie and Nurse Hazlewood, or " mother," as he called her — his only other friends in the world — were to stay behind. The two children were hardly aware that they were about to be taken away "for good;" and as they were being dressed for their departure, they were full of glee, under the idea that they were going for a short time outside of the old brick walls ; so they laughed and clapped their hands, whilst Nurse Hazlewood was sobbing so that she could hardly see to tie their clothes for the tears that were in her eyes. She knew that she could stop the leaving of her daughter, but over her foster-boy she had no power ; and then came the idea that even if Bertha did remain with her there inside those four high walls, she would grow up half silly, like Emma Dixon, the crazy woman's child. The poor thing sobbed and moaned as if her heart were breaking, but still she was deter- mined, for the child's sake, to bear up against the agony of the part- ing. And when the time came for leaving, and she saw the two uncon- scious children eager to quit her, she flung her arms round them and pressed them to her till all the clean clothes she had been so busy ar- ranging were crumpled and soiled with her affection. They had at last to tear the children away by force, and as they did so, she cried aloud, " I can never let them go, matron ; oh ! don't take them from me." In kindness the little ones were hurried away from her, and as the door closed, the poor pauper mother flung herself on the table, and bursting into a convulsion of grief, called God to help her, crying aloud, " All's gone from me ! all's gone from me now ! I'm a lone woman — lone — lone !" PAYED WITH GOLD. 41 CHAPTEK II. THE PAUPER BOY'S NEW HOME. Yotje true Londoner seems to have as little affection as a bird for the place of his birth — the prevailing desire among Cockneys being to get away from their parent metropolis, and settle down in some civic country- cousin of a suburb. A statistical quidnunc has laid it down as an ethnological law, that scarcely a Londoner can trace a pure Cockney descent for three generations, urging that if the great- grandfather of a family had been born within sound of Bow-bells, the great-grandson seldom remains in the capital to inhale smuts with his air, but retires to end his days in the land of pure milk and fresh- cut vegetables. We cannot say whether there be any general truth in the statist's views of Cockney genealogy, but certain it is that London is becoming more and more a city of warehouses, chambers, wharfs, offices, and shops, rather than dwelling-houses and lodgings. Now that the metropolis has been transformed into a huge spider's web, with rail- way fibres radiating from its centre, the citizen, like the round-bellied insect itself, builds up a little retreat on one side of the great web, and is only seen to dart along the lines when there is anything " alive and stirring" that promises a "good catch" for him. It is this yearning for a mouthful of country air that sends the Lon- doner — yellow and smoke-dried as a Finnie haddock — gasping down to the sea-side every autumn, and it is a like craving to see more of the earth and its vegetation than the disc of mangy turf within the railings of a square that has caused the mushroom towns, with their colonies of lath-and- plaster villas and tiny stucco mansions, to spring into existence around every suburban railway station. By means of fast " business trains," Brighton is now scarcely far- ther from the capital "by rail" than is Hampstead by " 'bus ;" and the longitude of Windsor, measured by time, is hardly greater than that of St. John's Wood computed by the " City Atlas." And so it comes that morning and evening trains, as long as sea-serpents, rush up and down the line with each joint of their monster tail closely packed with season-ticket-bearing merchants. Near one of these small and new out-of-town towns was situated the pauper school to which the hero of our story was consigned. The town itself was as yet only in the bud, for many of the carcases of the houses had hardly had time to blossom into villas. Every patch of ground had a board up, announcing " This eligible site to be let on a building lease." Of the residences already erected, the larger majority were still unfinished, the works having been brought to a sudden stoppage by the evident bankruptcy of the speculating builder, and of these the " desibable caboases" were advertised for 42 PAVED WITH GOLD. sale ; whilst the few tenements that had been completed and rendered fit for habitation were in the excruciatingly genteel style of compo- grandeur, and in the "florid Cockney order" of architecture. They had all palatial porticos, and a double importance had been given to them by the cunning of the architect, who, by building them in pairs, had succeeded in imparting to two small houses the dignity of one large one. Each couple of villas, too, had a carriage- drive, big enough for a pony-chaise between them, and the little shrubs and delicate trees in the strips of gardens were evidently only just out of the nursery. Dotted all about was a thick sprinkling of public-houses, showing that the place was a favourite resort for Sunday excursionists from London ; and every one of the taverns had a grand balcony, fitted with benches, at the first floor, besides a flat roof^ furnished with tables and a flag- staff for the accommodation of Cockney smokers. / The St. Lazarus Industrial School was a long building, as plain in xy iter ircchiitjeUire iikd mek "mX as many windows as a contracting- builder's factory. It was of red brick, with white trimmings, and cocked-hat like pediments to the wings, that gave it a thorough British regimental look ; and it stood on the top of a hill, surrounded by its own grounds, and with an enormous central shaft rising above its roof like a lanky lighthouse. It ha^nothing of the look of a school, for there were no rows of white- curtained beds to be seen at the windows ; so that you expected, as you went by, to hear the whir of wheels and the clatter of hammers rather than the hubbub of chil- dren at play. On approaching the walls of the play- ground, however, the hum of hundreds of voices burst on the ear like the roar of the sea heard inland, and you saw hovering over the huge quadrangle behind the building a multitude of paper kites of all shapes and sizes, that seemed like so many birds poised in the air. The branches of the trees, too, around the wall were garlanded with the tattered remains of kite tails and bodies that had got entangled among the twigs, and made them look, with the bits of paper and string clinging to them, as untidy as old brooms. In this building were housed some seven hundred children, who, like young Phil, had been thrown upon the parish for support. They were of all ages ; some so young that they could hardly walk steadily, and others almost strong and expert enough to get a living for themselves ; and they were of all castes, too. A few had fathers and friends; though such parents were hardly worth the mentioning for the assistance they could afford their offspring in the world, for they were mostly paupers, like the children, whom poverty had stripped of home and cut off from the claims and ties of kindred. .Fewer still had relations who were in a position to visit them, and bring them small tokens of remembrance — petty offerings that had been squeezed out of the out-door relief, and yet were prized and envied as much as any hamper of good things ever received at the most " select" academy for young gentlemen. The majority of the pauper pupils, indeed, were the mere waifs and strays of the world — social drift- wood and salvage, cast upon the shores of London from the many wrecks of the stormy city. Some of these were foundlings, wretched PAVED WITH GOLD. 43 little beings picked up on a door-step, for whom even parochial vigilance could not trace a pedigree. Others were orphans in the profoundest sense of the word, with only parish guardians for a step- father, and who could never remember any home, nor, indeed, the inside of any house but that of the Union. A large proportion, moreover, bore the ironical stigma of being " love children," though these had known so little of love in the world, that once got rid of by their "unfortunate" mother, they had never seen her face or heard her voice afterwards. , The pauper school was the rag-fair of life, whither was brought the refuse of society — the " things" that had been discarded as so much lumber ; and, as in the old-clothes' market the mind wonders what is the history of the leffc-off coats, trousers, bonnets, and gowns collected there, as well as what possible use they can be hereafter put to, so, in this assemblage of infant cast-offs, one cannot help speculating as to the origin and ultimate destiny of the poor living rags and tatters' that others have flung aside as being utterly worth- less to them. * Of course, little Phil, mere babe as he was, was no more aware of the misery and degradation of his position in the world than a lord- ling in long clothes is conscious of the peculiar good fortune that has befallen him. Young Phil sipped his gruel from the iron spoon with an appetite as keen as that with which the sprig of nobility sucks his " soojee" from his silver pap-boat; for such undeveloped palates have not yet learned to discriminate between the vulgar and refined flavour of the different metals in the mouth. Neither had the little lad the faintest sense that the house he lived in was in any way different from that of other people ; for, could he have expressed his ideas on the subject, and generalised upon the rules of life, he would as surely have laid it down that all children are born in workhouses, as a savage would that blankets and rum are the perfection of human luxury. Consequently, had Phil been made to understand, while on his way to the St. Lazarus Industrial School, that he was going to spend the next ten years of his life at a pauper academy, he might have burst into tears at the tidings ; still, his sorrow would have been caused by the thought that he was leaving " home" and Mammy Hazlew r ood for good; for the Union was linked in his little mind' with all that made life dear, while the workhouse women, who had shared their ounce packets of sugar with him, seemed to his purblind vision the most admirable and favoured of human beings. The old pauper, who drove the workhouse covered-cart in which Phil and Bertha were being taken to the school, was an object of no slight envy and importance in the little community of St. Lazarus, getting, as he did, extra rations of meat and beer for the duty. He was remarkable for the peevishness of old age, and, from a half-idea that he was earning his living, had grown to have a contempt for his fellow-paupers, as well as to treat them with all the tyranny of petty authority. He seemed disgusted with the playfulness and restless- ness of the children on the journey, for when they came near him, 44 PAYED WITH GOLD. and shouted " Gee, gee !" to the horse, and touched the reins, or wanted to handle the whip, he grew as growly as an old lapdog at the tricks of a kitten, and cried out, " Lie down, or I'll give you a crack." Nor was he more inclined to listen to their wonderings and prattle by the way ; for when they beheld a fashionable footman for the first time in their lives, and — taken with the bright colours of the livery, as the man strutted, cane in hand, after his mistress — inquired if he was not a beadle, the old pauper grew more surly than ever at the mere mention of that despotic functionary, and, shaking the children's hands off his shoulders, said, " Cuss all beadles ! — don't bother me." On reaching the suburbs, and seeing the cows grazing in the fields, little Bertie, whose knowledge of natural history did not extend beyond the cat in the old women's ward, clapped her hands and jumped about, as she called out, " Puss ! puss !" " Gro back'ards, will you !" snarled the old driver, angry at being roused out of his half-doze over his pipe. Then came a young ladies' school, with the little girls walking two-and-two, and the tall mistress behind, whereupon both the chil- dren seemed to fancy that the governess occupied the same position as Mary Hazlewood had to them, for they exclaimed, at the top of their little voices, " Nursey ! nursey !" " Confound yer, keep quiet !" snapped the tetchy old fellow, as he knit his shaggy eyebrows at the little ones, till he looked as grim as a Skye terrier. We need not impress upon the reader that when a child is taken to a pauper-school, the reception is neither so endearing nor en- couraging as that which usually occurs when any new "young friend" is introduced to the classic head of a genteel academy. At the St. Lazarus Industrial School, the new comers were shown into no handsome reception-room, nor was any cake or wine had up to stop the tears of the fresh pupils ; neither was Phil taken between the knees of the master and patted on the head, nor told he would one day become as distinguished a gentleman as his father. Not that the children were ill-treated on their arrival at the pauper schools, but rather they w r ere received in the regular way of business, and little or no heed given as to whether they cared about coming there. Poor Phil and Bertie, indeed, were handed from the workhouse cart as unceremoniously as parcels from a railway van, and the same ticket given with them in acknowledgment of their receipt. Phil heard the superintendent read the piece of paper, beginning, " Please to receive the following children" and saw him stare first at himself and then at Bertie, as he muttered, " An orphan, and one other child ;" but the poor boy could hardly tell what it all meant. He felt frightened at the sight of the new faces and the big building, but still he had no definite idea that the place was to be his home for many a year to come, or that he was about to be separated from his foster-mother. "When, however, the grumbling old driver had mounted into the workhouse van again, and the children heard the wheels crunch over PAVED WITH GOLD. 45 the gravel drive on its way back to the Union, both the little things understood for the first time that they were to be left behind, and struggled to get to the door, screaming the while, " Mamma, come to me ! Mamma, come to me !" A child's fears are always excessive, and seem to grown people, from their intensity, like the caricatures of emotion, for with the very young there is no judgment to check the imagination, and fright once raised outruns all probability where there is no experience to check it. Little Phil and Bertie trembled and sobbed as if they had a confused notion that they were about to be killed. Every face they saw seemed to be of the ugliest possible character to their minds, for no matter whether it came smiling or frowning to them, they screamed and roared as if it belonged to that ideal enemy of all children, "Old Bogie" himself. If they had ever heard of fairy tales — and among the illiterate paupers such nursery-book lore is un- known — the little things would assuredly have fancied they had got into the castle of the Ogre in Hop-o'-my-Thumb, or into the strong- hold of the Giant in Jack and the Bean-stalk, and that all the chil- dren w r hom they saw were intended to be eaten up alive. First of all, they were half frightened to death by a tall woman, who dragged them through long passages and up steep stone stairs to a room, where their workhouse clothes were taken off, as if they were really going to be murdered on the spot ; and they made certain that such was to be the case, when, despite their screaming and cries for Nurse Hazlewood, they were plunged into a bath full of hot water, and there scrubbed till their skins and eyes smarted again with the friction and the soap. Nor was their confidence in any way restored when, dressed in the school costume, they were taken into the infant playground, where a hundred little things were playing about; for as soon as the new comers entered, the others left off their games, and drew round them in a circle, staring at them like so many sheep at a dog. Phil and Bertie did nothing but cling together and cry, for they were too young even to say a word of consolation to each other ; their little minds indeed being filled with a dull blank of grief. At supper they left their slice of bread-and-butter and mug of milk-and-water untouched, for then they were scared by the sight of the fifty little ones gathered to- gether in the nursery for the meal, and they had never seen so many children assembled in one room before. Everything they saw and heard, too, was so strange and different from the workhouse nursery, that they sat with their fingers in their mouths, looking timidly and wildly about them. When the bell rang for bedtime, and they were taken up into the infants' dormitory, where, instead of Nurse Hazlewood, a strange woman came to undress them, their little senses once more noted the difference of their situation, and their tears showed that they felt they were never to see " dear mother" again. Then, as they cuddled together, in one of the dumpy little iron bedsteads that crowded the large sleeping-room, they twined their arms about each other's necks as if they had really laid themselves down to die, like the children in the wood ; and there they sobbed away till their tears formed a wet 46 PAYED WITH GOLD. patch about their heads, so that the black lines of the tick could be seen through the moistened pillow-case. Before a week had passed, however, Phil had forgotten all the miseries that had so nearly broken his little heart on entering the school ; and ere long he had grown as attached to the place as he had been to his former home, so that had anybody attempted to remove him from his new one, he would most likely have felt the separation as keenly as he did his departure from the Union. He soon became, indeed, one of the merriest of the children there, for he made friends among his little toddling companions, and slowly grew to be as fond of his new nurse as he had been of his old one. His first year was spent in the babies' room, and here he was the biggest of the boys, for some of the others scarcely reached above the nurse's knee, whilst he was just tall enough to look over the iron bars of the nursery fender. His life in this part of the establishment had little to distinguish it from that in the workhouse, with the exception that at the in- dustrial school the child's days were not utterly toyless — play- things not being wholly unknown to the infants there. Over the mantelpiece in the dormitory was kept the humble stock of pauper playthings — a curious collection of broken penny articles and bits of gilt paper, which, poor as it was, was yet more than the workhouse itself could boast. There was a Noah's ark hardly bigger than a baby's shoe, and a wooden money-box, like a miniature trunk, but containing a few beads instead of coins ; and there was a cardboard cottage, decorated with pith, and a cat without a head, besides a few lids of old soap boxes, embellished with varnished pictures and gilt borders, together with a little tin grate, and a baby dustpan. But the grandest toy of all was the wooden horse, about as big as a pet spaniel, which the chaplain had given the little things. To ride on this was the great treat of the infants' room, and one which none but those who had been "as good as gold" were allowed to enjoy. A year's playing with the tin plate, stamped with the alphabet round the rim — a year's rattling the beads in the money-box, with a few rides on the chaplain's wooden horse, and Phil had become old enough to be moved down into the "infant boys' room," to take his first lessons in the infants' school, as well as to share in the games in the infants' playground. His seat during school hours was on the lowest stair of the broad flight of wooden steps that constituted a kind of gallery for the little pupils to be ranged upon during their lessons. The playground, too, was a fine place to jump about in, and it had no clothes hanging to dry in it, like the exercising-yard at the workhouse, so that he and Bertie could run and gambol in it without having the wet linen flapping in their faces. The superintendent's wife, too, had given Philip a penny battledoor and shuttlecock, and this was so precious a treasure that the little fellow, on first receiving it, wanted to carry it to bed with him at night, and nearly had it taken away because he screamed and kicked on not being allowed to do so. "Wretched little pauper schoolboys ! "We who can remember the sums that were spent in the toys of our youth — the Christmas- PAYED WITH GOLD. 47 boxes, and school money, and birthday gifts that were laid out with the old cake-woman of the school, or at the counters of that fairyland of our holidays, the bazaar — such as we may, perhaps, wonder how so poor a plaything could cause such great happiness as Phil's penny present yielded him. But to those whose babyhood is comparatively toyless, who hardly ever know even the childish luxury of a sweet- meat, and who are content to amuse themselves with a piece of paper fluttering at the end of a thread ; to them — lower as they are in the scale even than they who get an occasional " farthing to spend" — the present of a penny toy is an event in their young pauper lives to be remembered and dated from ; and many were the little orphans in that industrial-school playground, who not only looked up to the lucky possessor of the bit of wood with as much envy as our children do to the owner of a pony or a watch, but thought themselves the most happy and favoured people in the world if they were only allowed to have a short game with it. But the wind is beautifully tempered to the shorn lamb, and pauperism, ignorant of higher enjoyments, plays as happily with its " dirt pies" and "rag dolls" as even young princes with their work- ing models of steam-engines and clockwork singing-birds. CHAPTEE III. THE PAUPER SCHOOL. Time was, when your pauper schools were little better than pauper pens for pauper cattle to be kept in until they were old enough — according to law — to work their way, slowly but surely, from the workhouse to the prison, and thus shift the burden from the parish to the county. In such days the maintenance of the young pauper herd was put up to competition, and he who bid the lowest figure had the job. JSTor was it until some violent fever had broken out and threatened a pestilence among the ratepayers, or until the expenses of the parish funerals had amounted to unwieldy sums which no nicety of finance could conceal, that guardians began to trouble their heads about the fate of the miserable wretches to whom they had consented to act as deputy fathers. There are some people who never think of sanitary measures until the cholera is abroad ; and assuredly parish overseers are among the number, for it is only when our social dust- bins reek in the nostrils, and pour forth at each commotion a very miasma of moral disease, that any steps are taken to purify the noxious mass, or to put an end to the abomination. Luckily for PhD, he had begun his career in life at a time when the outcast children of the land were no longer fed and trained by con- tract. It had already been discovered that the best means of putting a stop to the habitual pauperism which infested our workhouses as thickly as rats do a sewer, was by training the young parish outcasts 48 PAVED WITH GOLD. to some calling which would enable them to keep clear of the Union for the future ; and it is this discovery which has called into existence a class of institutions which are at once the noblest and most useful in the land — the Pauper Industrial Schools. The school at which Phil had been placed differed but little from those now scattered about the suburbs of London. It was a little self-supporting community, the children being taught to do almost every office that was needed for themselves and their fellows. The boys worked upon the farm and the farm-yard, growing the fodder for the cattle that yielded the milk, which the girls made into butter and cheese for the parish scholars. Again, the linen on their backs, as well as their clothes and shoes, were all made in the parish-girls' needleroom or the parish-boys' workshops. The school steam-engine, moreover, was stoked and tended by young pauper engineers, and even the repairs of it wrought by young pauper smiths, whilst the mangles and washing machines which the steam set in motion were managed by young, pauper laundresses, who did all the washing for the little colony. [Thus some seven hundred childish creatures were taught to live, witn all the economy, regularity, and beauty of a hiveT] The bread they eat was kneaded and baked by their own young hands, the meat cooked by them, and the place cleaned ; whilst even the gas which lighted the building young paupers had helped to manu- facture. Indeed, there was hardly a want in the place that was not supplied by the same young labourers. There were boy carpenters to build or repair, as well as boy painters and glaziers to colour the woodwork and mend the windows, together with boy bricklayers to whitewash. And yet, while the hands were being taught, the mind was not left untrained ; and so sound was the teaching, that some of ■ the more apt of the pauper pupils were being educated to become the I future masters of that or some similar institution. It was a sad day for Phil when his time came to be removed from ; the "infants' " side to the "boys' " portion of the school buildings. The change was like going into a new world again, for he had to leave all his little friends with whom he had been associated for so long a time. Moreover, the boys in the upper playground were all strangers to him, and so much bigger than himself, that he felt the same fear of going among them as he had done on first coming to the school itself. But though he was now old enough to be ashamed of showing such a feeling, still the thought of being separated from Bertie, whom he had got to love as a real sister, caused him more grief than he had artifice to conceal. The little girl, however, had no check upon her sorrow, and, as they sat apart under the shed in the playground, she whimpered and rubbed her eyes with her knuckles until her tears w r ere coloured with the dirt off her hands, so that she seemed to have been weeping Indian ink. But Philip was just little man enough to know that the big boys he was going among would laugh at him if they saw his eyes were red with crying ; so he swallowed his sobs, and endeavoured to persuade her (and himself at the same time) that " there was no good in fretting, for it wasn't as if they were going to be shut up away from one another, as he would still be able to see PAVED WITH GOLD. 49 her at meal-times and at chapel on Sundays, and he would take care and nod to her every day even if he couldn't speak." One marked difference that existed between the infants and the boys at the Industrial School was, that the younger children had not yet sense enough to speculate as to their origin or the condition of their parents ; whereas the elder boys were continually puzzling their brains with the mystery of their existence. No less than two hundred out of the three hundred lads who thronged the upper playground were orphans in the fullest sense of the word, and even the parents of the less destitute children were either in the Union or in the re- ceipt of out-door relief. It was reckoned among the boys at that school as extraordinary a circumstance for a lad to have a father living, as it is at other seminaries remarkable for a youth to be with- out one. At the generality of academies for young gentlemen, there is some one pupil, whose parents being out in India, or who, having only a guardian to look after him, is left at the school during the vaca- tion, and such a one is always an object of pity among his companions, and sympathised with even by the servants of the establishment. At the pauper school, however, there were no holidays at all, simply from the fact that there were no homes to go to, nor even with the larger proportion of the seven hundred little outcasts were there any mothers or fathers to receive them. "When Phil, in his skeleton suit of corduroy, was turned into the big playground, the " new boy" was soon spied out ; and as the news spread round, the games were stopped, and the lads at the farther end of the ground left off swinging round the gymnastic pole, whilst those who had been making kites, or indulging in " fly the garter," came streaming out of the "playroom" to have a peep at the fresh comer. They stared at him at first as strange animals gaze at each other, until at last began the round of boyish questions touching his private history and condition. " "What's your parish ?" was the first question, and which came as naturally to the orphan scholars as the inquiry concerning the parentage of a new pupil is common among other schoolboys. The speaker was the big boy of the school, who, by virtue of his size, had been promoted to a cord-jacket, vice a skeleton suit resigned. Phil gave [no answer, for he felt that if he said a word he must burst into tears. " Are you an orphan ?" asked another, who was not, and was always glad to show off a bit before his less lucky schoolfellows. Phil nodded his head, on which he was told " to speak up, and say at once whether he had got a father and mother, or not." " Nurse Hazlewood, please, is the only mother I've got," stam- mered Phil. At this there was a shout from several boys who belonged to St. Lazarus Without, and who instantly exclaimed, " Why, she's the Union nurse, spooney ?" A lad with a crutch, anxious to befriend little Philip, here ob- served : " He means, perhaps, she's his foster-mother" — for all the boys at that school understood the most minute relations of orphan- 50 PAVED WITH GOLD. age, so that terms that would have been as Greek to more favoured children were naturally comprehensible to them. The speaker, however, was set upon by the united boys belonging to 'St. Lazarus, all of whom shouted, " What can you know about it"; you came from St. Job the Martyr, so just shut up !" It was curious how the boys at the Industrial School were divided into little cliques, the lads from the different parishes making cronies of their fellow-parishioners just as those from the same county become friends at other seminaries. " Are you a foundling ?" inquired another lad. " Come young'un, you needn't be timorsome over it, for there's a jolly lot of us here." Almost the only thing that young Phil remembered concerning his origin, was having heard Nurse Hazlewood once tell one of the guardians, while going his rounds of inspection through the work- house, " that he was the boy whose mother had been a lady, and died in prison ;" he remembered it well, because the gentleman had patted him on the head, and given him his first halfpenny at the time. So Philip paid no heed to the question, but turned away from the speaker. " Come, don't sulk," cried one of the boys ; and, pointing to an- other, he continued : " This chap, here, was tied in a fish-basket to the relieving officer's knocker." " No I wasn't," retorted the other, in the midst of the laughter. " My mother's a washerwoman, and has two-and- sixpence a week and two loaves, out-door relief, on account of her rheumatiz." The examination-in-chief was then taken up by the lad with the crutch, who said : " Cheer up, don't be afraid to tell us chaps here. You were deserted, I suppose, and haven't got any friends ?" " I've got Nurse Hazlewood," Philip answered, simply, as if he thought that was everything in the world. " She ain't the sort of friend we mean. Ain't you got no relations, such as will give you a red comforter like we've got." The comforter here referred to w r as the great mark of distinction between those boys who could boast of some kindred and those who were utterly friendless in the world. The parish allowance, by way of neck-tie for the scholars, consisted merely of a piece of black shoe- ribbon, to fasten the shirt-collar ; and the bright-coloured, worsted cravat, to keep the chest and throat from the cold, had come to be a regular sign in the school that the wearer had somebody to care about him ; so that, as the eye glanced over the playground, it could pick out the children who were not utterly destitute as easily as corporals can be distinguished from privates by their stripes. " Don't you know where you were born, and how you came to have a settlement in St. Lazarus ?" was the next inquiry. Philip shook his head ; for though he had often heard the word " settlement" used in the Union, and knew that it was looked upon by the inmates as a kind of indisputable claim or birthright to the place, still he had not yet got to understand what it meant so clearly as his questioners. " Well, tell us how you became chargeable ? Was your father an able-bodied or in-doors man ?" PAYED WITH GOLD. 51 " Please, I've heard mother Hazlewood say my real mother was a lady." A shout of laughter burst from the boys at the reply. " Ho, ho !" roared one, " here's another gentleman's son come !" as if it was usual for the foundlings to fancy they were born of distinguished parents. One lad, called Billy Fortune, had evidently been indulging in such a dream, for somebody cried out, " I say, Bill, here's one of your sort ; you say your father was butler in a nobleman's family, and I shouldn't wonder now if this young'un had bounce enough to tell us his mother had been cook in the same place." Philip could restrain his tears no longer, but turned his head round to the wall, and as he hid his face against his arm, wished to himself that he had never been taken away from the infant side of the school, but allowed to pass his life near sister Bertie. At this moment the newly-finished large kite, that had been the talk of the school for weeks, was brought out of the playroom, and as it was known to have exhausted the pocket-money of six of the richest boys, who had "gone partners" to buy the fourpenny ball of string for it — even though the engineer had made them a present of an old twopenny newspaper to. cover it with — all the boys instantly quitted Phil, and ran off to the new toy, the same as if a Punch and Judy's call had been heard chirruping them away. The only one who stopped behind was the boy with the crutch. He said nothing, but remained quietly listening for a while to Phil's whimpering. Presently he tapped the little fellow on the shoulder, and said, " Don't take on like that, for if the chaps see you they are sure to call you ' cry-baby.' " There was another pause, and when at last Phil brightened up sufficiently to turn round, the lame boy added, "If you'll be my croney I'll be yours. I haven't got any fellow I care much about, for I can't join in their games on account of my leg." As he men- tioned the affliction, the boy stuck out a mere stump of a limb, which had been taken off so close to the hip that the poor fellow seemed all lop-sided, and made one fancy that he couldn't even stand, much more walk, if it wasn't for his crutch. Phil was so taken with the sight that he could hardly remove his eyes from the mutilated limb, whilst the cripple, taking advantage of the silence, ran on with a kind of introduction of himself as the best beginning to their friendship. " J\^name^2S„ Ned Purchase. My mother died in the hospital, and I belong to^B^T'Yiius-in-the-Pields. I don't remember my father, but he kept a beer- shop in JSTewcastle-on-Twine, and paid rates for ever so many years. I'm called Goosey here 'cause I've only one leg." " Were you born like that ?" asked Phil, pointing to the stump. " JSo, it was took off for a white swelling at the Tree Hospital by Surgeon Sharp. Who was your parents ?" "Hid it hurt?" " I can't remember it now, for I wasn't above four year old. Do you recollect your father ?" "You can't do any thing without a leg, can you?" e2 52 PAVED WITH GOLD. " Oh, can't I though !" answered Ned Purchase, who, like all afflicted persons, was rather vexed than pleased with the continual iteration of pity to which his misfortune daily subjected him. " Why, I ain't half as bad off as Tom Lott here — he's lost' his right arm — for I can work at a trade, and he can't do nothink but run errands if he don't get to be a pupil teacher, which he won't, for he ain't half quick enough. Then there's Mike Saunders, poor chap, his back- bone is injured, and there he has to go about bent double as if he was down at leap-frog. He'll never be able to do nothink at all, but will have to remain in the Union till he dies. Ah ! we've got a lot of chaps here like that — heaps !" The two new friends then made the round of the playground. It was a large gravelled court-yard, two acres in extent, set with gym- nastic poles at the end by the long shed, under which the boys played in wet weather. On one side was a series of cottage-like buildings ; and these were the shops where the various trades were taught to the pauper pupils. Thither Phil was led by his lame companion, and told to look through the wire work protecting the windows. He saw a lad busy planing at a bench, and the long curling shavings twisting about his hands, whilst another was busy knocking together with his mallet the framework of a door. Phil, as he gazed at the result of the boys' handiwork, looking so clean and smooth, could not help exclaiming with delight, " I'll ask them to let me be a carpenter." " You'd better leave it alone," answered Ned Purchase, " and make up your mind to go to farm-work, for that's what you'll have to do, 'cause you're strong." The next window they peeped through was at the tailor's shop, and there Phil saw some twenty boys seated cross-legged on the shop- board, with their coats and jackets off, and stitching away at the stiff, new corduroy suits of the school. " How would you like to be a tailor ?" asked ISTed, with a look of glee. " It wouldn't suit me at all to sit like that all day long," replied Phil. "It's going to be my trade," said Ned, proudly; "you see my leg won't be missed when I'm sitting down in that way." Then they glanced at the shoemakers' miniature factory, and saw the little fellows in their leathern pinafore-like aprons, jerking out their arms as they pulled the waxen thread through the shoe-leather, or hammering big, square-headed nails into the soles. Phil cried, " Well, I'd rather go to farm-work and be out in the fields than be stuck down to that sort of thing." "Ah! would you?" responded Ned, with a sneer ; "you'll tell a different tale when you've been here a few years. All the shoemaker chaps get into a place, and begin doing something for themselves in no time, but the farm-boys stick on hand, and can't be got off no- how ; many of them, too, after all, have to be sent back to their parishes, to be bound to a chimley-sweep or a butcher, maybe." Prom this they passed to the boiler-house, and watched the great engine flinging its brazen arms up and down, whilst a little fellow, PAVED WITH GOLD. 53 scarcely bigger than Phil, passed his hand between the network of moving mechanism, as he poured oil into the joints as calmly as if he were feeding a lamp. Philip felt his heart swell as he thought how he should like to be aBIe to manage such an enormous machine as that ; but his dream was interrupted by Ned Purchase saying to him, " Ah ! there's lots of boys would give anything if they could get put into the engine-room, but there's no chance, for there's only two ever wanted there." By this time the kite had been raised high into the air, and nearly all the boys were collected in a circle round the happy lad who held the string, so Ned Purchase thought it a good opportunity for taking Phil into the playroom. This was a long, empty outhouse, and against the walls hung the skeletons and bodies of kites, in every stage and style of manufacture. Some were only bits of brown paper cut into the shape of a heart, with a thread and tadpoley tail hanging to them. Others were mere frameworks, ranged against the wall like an armoury of infantine cross-bows ; and others again were half-covered and like a patchwork counterpane with the various bits of paper out of which they had been formed, and among which the eye recognised now a page of a penny London journal, and now a leaf of an old copy-book, with a round-hand lesson upon it, and line after line repeating, " England WAS OEIGINALLY PEOPLED BY " Thus it was that Philip and the lame boy made friends ; and that evening was passed in telling stories one to another of all they could remember of their early history, and all that they knew of the workhouse where they had been brought up. They compared the dietaries, too, of their different Unions, and asked innumerable questions as to whether they had ever heard of this and that pauper (for the boys seemed to fancy all the poor must be acquainted with each other, in the same manner as even educated people imagine that anybody who has been to India must have been intimate with every Englishman out there). They chatted, moreover, about the guardians who had taken notice of them, or — more memorable than all — that had ever given them a penny. Long before the bell rang for bedtime, the two boys were sitting together with their arms twined round each other's neck, talking the wildest romance that, like hope and dreams, is the heritage of even pauper youths in common with all others. It was then duly arranged that Ned Purchase was to marry sister Bertie ; and when Phil's father — who it was at last settled must have been some grand gentle- man — was found, they were all three to live together, and do nothing but ride on ponies all day, and have pudding for dinner every day in the week. "Ah, don't I wish I was as rich as a guardian — that's all!" said Phil. " How much money do you think a guardian has got — a hundred pounds ?" " Much more than that, you silly," answered Ned, " or how could they pay for the keep of such a lot of people as they do — more like five hundred pounds." " Eive hundred pounds 1" exclaimed the thunderstruck Phil, lost 54 PAYED WITH GOLD. in the immensity of the sum. " I wonder how much that makes in farthings ? I only wish we had got it, we wouldn't wait for father's coming back, then!" " But God won't let all be rich," answered Ned, moralising. " Though, as the chaplain says, there's the same God for the rich as the poor." Phil looked down thoughtfully on the ground, and murmured: " Why should God like the rich better than the likes of us, I wonder, and give them such a lot, and leave hardly anything for the poor!" " I can't tell, I'm sure," said the simple Ned ; " but the chaplain says we are to have our reward by-and-by when we die, and that a rich man might as well try to squeeze himself through the eye of a needle as to get into the kingdom of Heaven." " Well, but," inquired Phil, " if only the poor are to go to Heaven, what a number there will be up there ; and if there ain't to be any guardians, who will take care of us then ?" " Why, don't you know that God is the great guardian of all?" said Ned, who, workhouse orphan as he was, had learnt to regard the Deity in that character rather than as the great Father of all. " And didn't He make the world and all the money that is in it, thousands and thousands of years ago?" " Thousands and thousands of years ago !" murmured Phil, half to himself; "why, that was when I was nothing." CHAPTEE IV. FOUR YEARS AND THEIR CHANGES. The history of one day at the pauper school was so like that of another, that to describe the daily routine was to record the events of the last four years that Phil passed at the place. The changes in the week days were hardly known to the boys by the names they bore, but rather by the alteration they brought in the diet ; for what are ordinary called Tuesday and Thursday were spoken of at the Indus- trial School as " meat-pudding days," whilst Sunday, Wednesday, and [Friday were " suet-pudding days," and Saturday " soup day," instead of being styled after the usual nomenclature of the almanack. To those under eleven years of age the school itself presented little or no variety, whilst to those above that age it afforded the relief of working in the shops or on the farm every alternate day in the week. With these slight exceptions, the life of the pauper seminary was as much a matter of drill, order, and regularity, as if the establish- ment had been some infantine rather than infantry barracks. Every morning at six the bell in the court-yard rang with the same clatter as for a departing steam-boat, and instantly all the PAVED WITH GOLD. 55 dormitories, which a few seconds before had been almost as quiet as hospital wards, were alive and bustling as a ship's company in a sudden squall. The dormitories themselves were long, bare, but cleanly wards, with a row of iron bedsteads ranged down either side of them, whilst in one corner was a compartment partitioned off as a separate berth for the pupil teacher. The only things that broke the monotony of the white walls were the large placards of Bible texts placed over the doors, some impressing the precept, " Speak not evil one op another," and others bearing the words, " Set a watch O Loud BEFORE " MOUTH, KEEP THE DOOR OP MY LIPS." A minute or two after the bell ceased ringing the lads were up and partly dressed, with their bedclothes turned back, and readj waiting for the order of the pupil teacher to " face their beds." Then came the command, "Kneel down," and in an instant all was silent again, with the youths bent in prayer at the foot of the iron bedsteads, and inwardly breathing their supplications to Heaven. At such times even the most callous might have been touched by the solemn sight of the wretched fatherless creatures appealing to their spiritual Father for care and protection throughout the day. The next minute the boys had taken their jackets from under their pillows, and, drawn up in file before the dormitory door, were await- ing the signal of "forward" to pass from the room and get their shoes from the nest of pigeon-holes in the lobby outside. Then came the calling over names, and the washing in the lava- tories at the side of the playground ; and this done, the whistle of the drill-master was heard, and the boys were drawn up in rank and file for inspection. All was now ready for breakfast and family prayer, but long before the meal the boys and girls who helped in the kitchen had been busy ranging along the tall, narrow benches that served for tables, and made the dining-hall look like a huge writing academy, the seven hundred cans of milk and water, and the seven hundred thick lumps of bread and butter, that formed the provision for the morning's re- past. And when the large hall, big as an assembly-room, was filled for morning prayers with every soul in the place, except the youngest of the infants — officers and servants, as well as boys and girls — the eye was enabled to comprehend the extent of the bounty feeding such a host of mouths that must otherwise have gone without a crust. Nor could the visitor help contrasting the cleanly and tidy look of the destitute little throng with the filth and rag- gedness of other poor children, who are thought to be better off in the world than those who are driven to the parish for support. When, in answer to the three taps on the table, the entire multi- tude stood up to say " grace," the clatter of their sudden rising was like the shooting of a load of stones, and as they remained with their eyes shut, half-intoning the supplication for a blessing on their food, they seemed like a legion of blind mendicants, all uttering the jaame petition for charity. The boys were delighted with the drill that formed part of the summer exercises ; for it was not only like playing at soldiers, but, 56 PAVED WITH GOLD. from its half gymnastic character, had all the excitement of an athletic game. The old drill-master, too, who had served at Water- loo, was as pleased with the work as the lads themselves, and evidently felt the same enjoyment at the mimic military evolutions as veterans are said to experience when teaching their grandchildren to shoulder their crutch. Accordingly, the very first signal that Sergeant Shaw blew from his silver whistle, brought all the lads trooping to the manikin review. Leap-frog was given over, the iron hoops that the engineer had made for the boys ceased to rattle over gravel, the kites were hauled down, and the playroom emptied. No sooner were the three hundred lads drawn up in one long, double line, than the sergeant, pacing in front of the miniature ranks, with all the pride of a general, shouted out his command of " To the left face !" and then the noise of the whole line twirling on their heels simultaneously, sounded like a wave upon the shore. After this came the order, " Quick, march!" and instantly the little troop filed along, the pauper corduroys whistling as they went with the friction of the legs that kept twinkling backwards and forwards, like the moving blades of scissors, and the feet pulsating on the ground, as the drill- master marked the time with cries of " Left, left ! — one, two ! — left, left ! — one, two !" Thus the tour of the playground was made, and then the boyish regiment drew sharply up across the quadrangle at the sound of " Halt !" Now followed, in rapid succession, the commands of " Eyes front !" " Eanks of divisions, prove !" " As you are !" " Bight file, prove !" " As you are !" " Rear rank, open order 1" " Form four deep 1" " Prove distance !" "As you are !" — and, as each order was given, it was peculiar to see the little pauper phalanx execute the command with a precision that one and all delighted in. Even the lame boy, Ned Purchase himself, was pleased to be allowed to form one of the orphan army, and went jerking along on his crutch, fancying he was marching and manoeuvring as well as the best. Phil liked the drill much better than the schooling, and, indeed, had already made up his mind to be a soldier directly he was tall enough to " 'list ;" and when he heard that one of the boys had taught himself to play the flute so well, that the superintendent had got him to be taken into the Gruards as a fife-player, he thought it the greatest good luck that could possibly befal a human being, and every night made it a special request in his prayers that Heaven would be equally kind to him. "With the " pupil- teachers" Phil bore the character of being a dunce, but with his companions in the playground he was considered to be one of the sharpest among them. He was generally at the bottom of his class, though at gymnastics he could mount to the top of the pole quicker than any other ; at arithmetic even the smallest boys on his form could jump over him, but at fly-the-garter he could take the " five-foot leap," and clear a back, without even " toeing the line," far easier than boys double his size. Immediately the summons was given for assembling for school, his animal spirits seemed to leave him ; and no sooner did he enter the big schoolroom, with the different classes divided off by red baize cur- PAVED WITH GOLD. 57 tains, and the lecture-hall-like seats, ranged gallery fashion, one above another, than his heart sank within him, and he sat lumpishly in his place, staring at the maps hung round the walls — first glancing, half- vacantly, at the chart of " The travels of the Apostle Paul," then wandering away to the " Land of Promise after its conquest by the Israelites." Nor did he wake up from his reveries even when the big black board, hung like a cheval-glass, was wheeled in front of the class, and the pupil-teacher chalked the simple addition sum upon it ; for when the boy-master asked the lads how many 6 and 8 made, Phil thrust out his hand mechanically with the others as a sign that he could tell, though on being bidden to do so, the guess of twenty- two showed that his little mind was far away, wondering what Asia was like from the map, and how long it would take him to walk there. At reading aloud from the " daily lesson book" he made as sad a mess as at figures ; and even though the twenty boys before him had all repeated the exercise of "The Bird's Nest," drawling out the little verse, God taught the bird to build its nest Of wool, and hay, and moss ; God taught her how to weave it best, And lay the twigs across. Nevertheless, w r hen it came to his turn, he stammered over nearly every word, and had to spell half the syllables, so that it was utterly impossible to get any sense out of the simple rhyme. But what Phil hated worse than all, and what he firmly believed was nothing but an ingenious torture devised by some demon peda- gogue for the express purpose of worrying little boys, was the exer- cise called "Dictation" — especially that upon " words spelt differently, but having similar sounds," so that he was fairly driven out of his wits when he had to write down such a sentence as the following : " You are right in saying that rite means a ceremony and wright a maker, as the marriage rite and a wheelwright, but it is difficult to write them all rightly ; so pray write this sentence, £ Mr. Wright's marriage rites gave the wheelwright's daughter — so she writes — all the rights of a married woman.' " A stranger visiting the Industrial School with the knowledge that at least two-thirds of the little pauper boys were orphans, would doubtless have been startled to find them playing about the gravelled quadrangle as merrily as if they had the kindest and best of parents to take care of them ; such a one would have come to the conclusion that others felt their destitute condition more keenly than the boys themselves. Nevertheless, there were moments when even the most thoughtless of the orphan lads were roused to a sense of their terrible loneliness in the world, and these occurred principally when any of the more lucky boys were visited by their friends ; for then a kind of wretched envy seemed to seize upon the most destitute, as the conviction forced itself upon them that they might stop there for years and years with- out the chance of any friend ever coming to see them. 58 PAVED WITH GOLD. Sometimes, when all the little fellows were playing together, laugh- ing and jumping about, the cry of "Hodge wanted," or "Cumber visited," would echo through the playground; then all the games ceased, and as the happy Cumber or Hodge was seen scampering to- wards the combing-room, where the friends visited the boys, the others would creep up to the door and try to catch a glimpse of that great rarity — a friend — and afterwards slink away to talk moodily together about either what they remembered as to their own father or mother, or else what they had merely heard about them. But what seemed to lacerate their little hearts more sharply than all, was when the self-same fortunate youths, some half-hour after- wards, reappeared among them, their faces red and glowing with delight, and carrying in their hands the peg-top or the orange that had been brought them. Then all would gather round, and twenty voices ask at once, " Who had been to see them, and what they had given them ;" while the sight of the halfpenny or even the farthing they had received, would cause many and many to sigh, and wish they had such rich friends to visit them. Some, too, would follow the lucky lad about the ground, and watch him as he rolled his orange round and round in his hands "to make it juicy," and beg, as he ate it, for even a bit of the peel. For the remainder of that day, too, there was a general depression thoughout the school, and nothing else was talked of but Hodge or Cumber and his grand friends, and num- bers wished they were only like him. Phil had two friends who sometimes came to see him — the one Nurse Hazlewood, and the other the principal matron of the prison in which he had been born ; but though the latter, when she called, gave her true name of Miss Perriman, still, for the boy's sake, she was anxious that neither ne nor any else should know who she was. The visits of Nurse Hazlewood, however, w r ere but little thought of among the schoolboys ; for as she was known to be in St. Lazarus Union, and she generally asked, when she came, to see many of the other boys who had been under her care, scarcely any excitement was produced by her presence at the school. Moreover, the poor old woman hadn't the means to give such costly tokens of her love as halfpence or oranges to each of her nurslings ; and the half-pint of nuts, which she usually brought with her, appeared so little when it came to be doled out among them all at the rate of six to each, that Phil was rather taunted than envied during the two days in the year on which his foster-mother came. But to do the little fellow justice, he ca ^d far more to see his workhouse mother than the grand lady with her velvet mantle and parasol, who gave him sixpence every time she called. The old nurse, when he entered the visiting-room, and ran to throw his arms about her neck, would seize hold of " her own Phil," as she always called him, and hug and kiss him as much as she did sister Bertie at her side. And there they would sit for more than an hour together talking about the " house," and she would tell him of the changes that had taken place in it since he left, while they would listen with the same interest that others do to the tales of home. PAYED WITH GOLD. 59 She would chat to him, too, about blind Willie, and when she had brought the little fellow vividly back to Phil's mind again, he would ask all kinds of questions about the poor lad, and what he and Will used to do when they were in the Union together. There was one question, however, that was always uppermost in Philip's mind. He had heard the orphan boys so often sit speculat- ing by the hour as to their parentage, and others telling tales of what they had known of their family, that a craving had come upon him to learn something about his own, — more particularly about his mother, of whom he had heard so little, and yet that little im- plied so much. Accordingly, whenever Nurse Hazlewood made her appearance at the school, he was sure to ask her how she knew that his mother had died in prison. The answer was invariably the same, " Tou mustn't ask me, child ; I can't tell you anything more than I have." •" But Ned Purchase says it's only wicked people who are sent to prison," continued Phil. " Was mother, then, wicked ?" Poor Nurse Hazlewood was shocked at the words, and exclaimed, as she threw up her hands, " Heaven forbid, boy, that I should ever live to say such a thing to a child of its poor dead parent !" " Ned Purchase declares she couldn't have been a lady if she died in prison," continued Phil, sorrowfully. " But she was a lady — wasn't she ?" " Tell Ned Purchase not to go bothering his head about other people's mothers," the nurse would reply. " But, nursey," coaxed Phil, creeping up to the old woman, " who was it told you she was a lady ? There, don't shake your head, but try and recollect — do, please — for me, nursey. You'll learn all about it, won't you, now, by the next time you come ?" And every time she came the same questionings and answerings went on. Phil's other visitor produced a far greater commotion among the boys : for whenever she paid her yearly visit, it was instantly buzzed over the school that the grand lady had come to see Merton again ; and as she always gave him a silver sixpence on leaving, she was classed by the poor pauper lads as being among the most wealthy in the land. No sooner, too, was the visit at an end, and Phil among his com- panions again, than all crowded enviously round him, to hear what the lady had said, " She says she knew mother," Phil would exclaim, boastingly, and not a little proud that his mother should have had such a friend. " Did she though ? Then I shouldn't wonder if your mother was a real lady, after all !" one of the boys would reply. " Yes, she says mother stopped at her house some time," the elated Phil would go on.. " It's no use trying to cram us," one of the less credulous would exclaim. " If she was a friend of your mother, why did she let you become chargeable, eh?" 60 PAVED WITH GOLD. There was a laugh of derision among the boys, and Phil, in dudgeon, turned upon his heel, and retired to talk with Ned Purchase alone. " It's all true that I said just now, Ned — it is, upon my word and honour !" he would proceed, for he was as excited with what he had heard during the visit as he was angry at having the story doubted. "She- told me what mother was like ; and I'm sure she's seen her, and knows a lot about her too. She says she had dark hair and eyes, like me ; and that she has some letters of hers. She saw my mother, Ned, just before she died." " And is it true, then, she died in prison ?" inquired Ned Purchase, who knew all Phil's secrets. "Why didn't you ask her what she was in for?" he added; for the workhouse is so close to the gaol, that lads reared in the one are mostly acquainted with all the de- tails of the other. " So I did," answered Phil, full of what he heard, and gasping out the words in his excitement ; " but all she would tell me was that mother had been treated dreadful, and that she had been drove to do what she did." Phil got more of a dunce than ever, for, though when out in the playground the excitement of the games roused his boyish spirits, no sooner was he seated on the form of his class than his mind was away speculating as to what "the lady" had told him, and building up hopes upon the flimsy foundation of his father being still alive ; so that when it came to his turn to answer the sum that the master had chalked on the black board, " If a boy had sixty plums to eat in ten minutes, how many must he eat per minute ?" Phil, who was dream- ing of his mother, replied, " Just five-and-twenty when she died." Then as all the class burst out laughing, and the master thought Phil had meant the reply for a joke, he had to stop in school that afternoon for the blunder. Accordingly, when it came to Phil's time to be put to a trade, it was agreed that farm-labour was the only thing suited to him, for he was naturally loutish, they said, and therefore the work couldn't have the same blunting effect upon his intellects as it was found to produce upon quicker lads. The out-door work did Phil some little good, for he had less time to brood over his dreams, and the exertion of turning up the earth served to put an end to all his romantic fancies ; for digging-in manure and cleaning out pigsties are occupations which contribute but little to the development of the imagination. The agricultural portion of the Industrial School covered an estate some sixty acres in extent, and reminded one of a model farm, for the grounds were tilled with the greatest care, and the fields laid out almost with the same regularity as garden-beds. All trees had been cleared from the ground, and hedges replaced by invisible fences, so that the estate had more of a foreign than an English look about it, for the pasture-land seemed to be undivided from the arable, and even the kitchen-garden and the sprouting orchard were hardly distinguish- able from the farm itself. Far down at the bottom of the sloping land ran the channel of the r*v~ s^r.; X" £^^?;; ^^V&,>> >-^ 7/ ao 6ze> ; ///^?,;,^ •//?), PAVED WITH GOLD. 61 railway, hidden by the depth of the cutting, so that the rattle of the carriages, and the gusts of white steam that seemed to issue from the earth, as well as the working of the arms of the tall signal-posts hard- by, were the only evidences of the passing trains. The boys, in gangs of some half-dozen, with the bailiff at their head, tilled the earth by manual labour ; and often as a train rushed past, Phil would rest upon his fork to gaze after the engine as he saw it appear in the distance and lose itself among the hills ; and he would wonder to himself whither it went, and what the earth was like there, and whether he should ever be carried over the land by one of those quick darting things. This occurred day after day, and a craving at length fastened upon him to get out into the world and see the country and the towns of which he knew so little ; for as yet his travels had never extended be- yond his ride in the cart from the workhouse, and an occasional walk out with the school to have a game of cricket on the neigh- bouring common. "Working in the same gang with Phil was Billy Fortune, one of the biggest boys in the school, who had been at farm-labour so long that he had grown weary of waiting to be put out in the world, and was always grumbling at seeing those who had been taught trades easily provided with situations, whilst he remained on hand to dig and dig day after day as he had done for years before. "I wish a cove could only get away to sea," he'd say, sulkily, to Phil, when the bailiff was not near, " wouldn't I precious soon hook it. Where's the good of a fellow stopping at this work and never getting a halfpenny for hisself ? I want to be earning something, and if they won't help me to it, why I shall save them the trouble some of these fine days." Then Billy Fortune would proceed to tell Phil about ships, and how jolly the life of a sailor was, and give him such accounts of foreign lands as he had been enabled to gather from the school geography, until his little companion thought if it wasn't for Bertie and Ned Pur- chase, he, too, would like to go seafaring. The tie, however, which held Philip to the school, and which made it seem like a home to him, was destined shortly to be broken. Sister Bertie, who had grown to be a big girl, had risen so high in the estimation of the schoolmistress, that she had been promoted to the post of waiting-maid to the superintendent's wife. She had become, too, such a favourite with the chaplain, that he had promised to place her out in the world as soon as possible, and to get her a good situation. Phil, when he first heard of the promise, had half prayed that it might never be realised ; so when he was told that the situation had really been obtained, and that the day was even fixed for his sister's depar- ture, he hardly slept that night for crying ; for though it was seldom that he could speak to the girl, yet ever} r day at meal times he could nod his head to her and see her smile in return. Sometimes, too, he was allowed to have half an hour's interview with her in the passage between the girls' and boys' playgrounds ; consequently, he had never felt utterly alone in the place. When the time, however, arrived for the parting, and Bertie, 62 PAYED WITH GOLD. dressed for her journey, had come to the playground door to say good- by to her foster-brother, Phil was half surly in the selfishness of his grief at losing her. " Why, Phil, isn't it better now," said sister Bertie, consolingly to him. " I am to get 51. a year, after the first year, and only think what a help that will be to mother and you." " "Well, I don't know what you want to go at all for," grumbled Phil, " and leave a fellow all alone here. I wouldn't have done it to you." " I am going, Phil, to a sick old lady's," continued Bertie, playing with his hands, " who wants a girl to read to her ; and only suppose if any of her friends should have a place for a boy, why I should speak up for you of course, and then, perhaps, we might be near one another again." Phil pretended to treat the notion with contempt, but still he smiled with inward pleasure at the care of his sister for him. " Come, don't be angry, dear Phil," pleaded Bertie ; " you know the chaplain visits once every three months all those who have got situations, and you can always hear of me from him." Philip could not bear to look at the girl, so he turned his shoulder round, and she, thinking he was still angry, clung to him as she cried, " Oh, Phil, don't be cruel now ! you'll never let me go from you in such a way." The appeal was more than the boy could bear, and half-choked with his sobs, he stammered out, "It isn't that, Bertie ; but you can't tell how hard it is for a chap to lose his only friend in such a big place as this." Por some time after sister Bertie's departure, Phil bore up with the hope that perhaps her words might come true, and he be sent for to come and live at some friend of her mistress's ; but when week after week went by and no such happy message arrived, the only con- solation left the boy was to waylay the chaplain on his rounds and ask him whether he had seen or heard of Bertie lately. At such times the minister would tell him either that " she was going on very satisfactorily indeed," and that he had " every reason to be gratified with her conduct ;" or else he would kindly take him into his room and read him the remarks he had written in his report- book, after his last visit to the girl. " There, Merton, you see, Bertha Hazlewood has one of the best characters in my reports," he would say, patting Phil on the head, as he spread the book out before him. " Her conduct, you perceive, is exemplary — rises early — obeys cheerfully — works hard and willingly — is regular at her devotions, and, altogether, her moral and religious deportment of a very pleasing and consoling character." The effect of Bertie's absence, however, soon began to show itself on Phil, by the daily increasing impatience that he felt to be out in the world like his sister, doing something for himself; and whenever he heard that some of the boys in the tailors' or -shoemakers' shop, who had entered the school after himself, had been apprenticed and PAYED WITH GOLD. 63 "put out," he and Billy Fortune would grumble together, and vow that they wouldn't stop there farm-labouring much longer. About this time, too, it so happened that the guardians of St. Vitus-in-the-Fields discovered that Ned Purchase had no legal settle- ment in their parish — that indeed he belonged to some union in the north of England, and that they had been keeping him unlawfully for the last eight years. In a few hours everybody in the school knew that Ned Purchase had been found to have another parish, whereupon the young paupers were all busy, like so many little parochial authorities, discussing the niceties of settlement, and arranging how he was to be " passed" to his new union. "When Phil and Billy Fortune returned from farm-labour in the afternoon they found a crowd of lads round the cripple boy, who was half crazy at the idea of being torn away from what had grown to be a home to him, as well as terrified at the doubtful character of the new place he was to be sent to. And, indeed, it must be hard to such as him to find, when long asso- ciations have twined the affections round the haunts of their boyhood, that the ardent friendships of youth are to be severed with the sign- ing of a discharge-paper; and that they themselves are so utterly powerless and unheeded in the world, that directly it is discovered the burden of their keep can be legally shifted, they are moved from one " farm" to another as rapidly as cattle sold at a fair. The day after the news had been made known that Ned Purchase was to be passed to his legal settlement, he and Phil were seated in one corner of the playground shed talking earnestly with Billy Fortune, and with their heads so close together that they had evi- dently some profound secret among them. " I tell you," said Billy, " there it is printed, and I read it myself — it's in the old newspaper we had give us to cover the big kite with, and it says he was a poor cabin-boy that got aboard a ship at Ports- mouth, and he went over to the Ingies, and now he's come home with whole shiploads of money, and has got made a member of Parliament in consequence. If you like you can see it all yourselves — -just at the bottom near the tail of the kite ; there's the very speech as the gentleman made at a slap-up dinner he was asked to." " Where abouts is Portsmouth ?" asked Phil, for he had not the least idea whether it was in Europe, Asia, Africa, or America. "Oh! it ain't far off," answered Billy, who had a vague notion that it was somewhere near London Bridge ; "we could easily walk it and get a ship there, in less time than you can catch a tittlebat." " I should like to get out to India !" observed Phil, " and go riding in castles on elephants' backs, and shooting tigers, like it says in the history of ' Warren 'Astings ' that's in the library." " But they wouldn't take me as a cabin-boy, would they ?" ner- vously asked the poor cripple. " Why not, Groosey ?" inquired Billy Fortune ; though presently a sudden thought seemed to strike him, and he exclaimed, " Oh, you mean 'cause of your leg ! Pooh ! lots of fellows have told me that half 64 PAYED WITH GOLD. the old sailors at Greenwich have got no legs at all, and Lord Nelson, in his portraits, I know is always drawed with only one arm." "Whereupon the youngsters settled among themselves, and proved to each other's satisfaction, that a seafaring life was just the business for a cripple like Ned Purchase, as all that a sailor had to do was to pull ropes and steer the boat. Besides, as they very cogently urged, there couldn't be much walking about to be done on board such a small place as a ship. "And once out in India," continued Billy Fortune, " you'll be quite at home, Goosey ; for in every picture I've seen, there the kings and princes is sitting cross-legged like tailors, and you've been brought up to that business here, you know." The rest of the day the boys passed in the most out-of-the-way places about the building, plotting how their escape was to be managed. If anybody stopped near them, they instantly moved off to some more deserted spot. " You see," said Phil, " Saturday's half-holiday, and that's our time to be off, just after the names have been called over, for then, you know, we're allowed to go about the grounds where we like. Besides, we shall have a clear start all Sunday, for they can't well come.and look after us during church-time." " I vote," said the cripple, "that we walk out into the farm-fields, just as if we were going to fly our kite, and then we can sneak off round by the stables, and be through the hedge into the wood, at the back here, in a jiffy." " But when we're in the wood, how are we to get anything to eat ?" asked Billy, who was of rather a hungry disposition. " "We can't sell our clothes to get any money, you know, for, as they belong to the parish, they might have us took up for stealing." " Well, that is good ! How do you think Eobinson Crusoe lived, that we were reading about only the other night in the bedroom ?" cried Phil. " And if he could do it on an uninhabited island, surely we can manage it in a wood, where there's plenty of prime black- berries. What's nicer than them I should like to know?" And at the thoughts of the fruit Phil uttered the boyish exclamation of " Golly !" and rubbed his waistcoat up and down as expressive of intense delight. It was then ultimately arranged by the young runaways, after long deliberation, that they were to save as much bread as they could from their meals, and immediately after the Saturday's dinner they were to take their last farewell of the school, and then, making the best of their way to the Thames, walk along the banks of the river till they came to Portsmouth — which Bill Fortune assured them he knew was somewhere in that neighbourhood. PAYED WITH GOLD. 65 CHAPTER V.* THE RUNAWAYS. The three little pauper rebels having made up their urchin minds to decamp from the Industrial School, became inseparable companions, and passed every moment of their play-time in maturing their boyish plans. They -had their secret meetings in the most out-of-the-way places and obscurest corners, where they held solemn debates in mys- terious whispers, at the same time keeping a sharp look-out on the monitors and the drill sergeant. If their privacy were disturbed by any stray schoolfellow, the whole character of the assembly was in- stantly changed ; and so as to remove all suspicion of its unlawful object, the moment the signal of " somebody coming " was given, one of the conspirators would begin to whistle loud and boldly, whilst the others broke out into noisy conversation, or commenced romping together. So totally were the poor boys absorbed in their plottings, that, like true conspirators, they were nervous and uneasy unless in one another's society. Peeling rather timid as to the success of their plans, nothing appeared to give them so much courage as treating the possibility of a failure as an absurdity. Whenever Philip felt that his fears were overcoming him, he invariably made a point of accusing Billy Fortune with " being afraid, and wanting to back out of it," and the indignant denials and energetic manner of that bold young pauper never failed to inspirit the meeting and restore confi- dence. Before two days had passed, the little rebels had, by their altered manner, attracted the notice of the whole school, and but for the speedy execution of their plans they would certainly have been found out before a week had elapsed. Had they been three Eoman patriots arranging the overthrow of Tyranny and Ambition, their general behaviour could not have been more marked and sin- gular. Did any lad invite the stern Philippus Mertonus to join in the giddy delights of " hop-scotch," or "leap-frog," he answered with a haughty sneer, such as would have become a Brutus spurning the offers of a Caesar. Twice on the Eriday was Billy Fortune discovered drawing ships on his slate instead of " doing his arithmetic," and when threatened with punishment he tried to look as defying as he could, for he was saying to himself, " To-morrow at twelve I shall be miles away." Each of the three boys, whenever they met for consultation, always managed to bring with him some article or other which he had pilfered during the day, thinking it would be likely to prove useful during their stay in the wood. "I've got some lucifer matches," said Ned Purchase, at one of F QQ PAYED WITH GOLD. their rendezvous. " I collared 'em out of the tailors' shop. "Won't they be jolly useful making fires ?" " Ay," cried Billy Fortune ; "and I think I knows where there's a potato-field, and if one thing is primer than another it's baked 'murphies.' " " Here's my bread ; I didn't eat a bit at dinner on purpose," said Phil, pulling out a big slice from his jacket pocket. " Have you saved anything, Billy ?" " No, I eat my bread," answered the fat conspirator, " but I've prigged this string from Tom Close's kite. It will do first-rate for tying branches together when we make our cave." When Friday night came, and the three boys were sleeping in their school beds for the last time, as they thought, they could none of them close an eye for thinking of the step they were about to take on the morrow. Phil felt almost ready to cry with depression, for however "jolly" he may have called the scheme when chatting it over with the others, yet something within himself warned him that he was about to take a foolish step in life, which would plunge him into the uncertainty of the world's struggles before he was fitted to encounter them. Billy Fortune was of too brutal and coarse a nature to bestow two thoughts upon anything that he did. He only felt that he desired a change of scene, and running away was the easiest mode of gratifying himself. "With Ned Purchase, however, the case was very different. The poor cripple knew that he had only to choose between being sent away from the place which he had grown to love as a home, and leaving it of his own accord. School hours were over, and the Saturday's half-holiday had begun. The three boys, with their pockets bulging out with the pieces of crust they had saved, crept round by the kitchen- garden, crouching against the wall, until they reached the hedge that divided oft the wood ; when, dashing through an opening in the fence, they plunged into the thicket, and ran off like frightened hares into the darkest part of it. Now all their boyish dreams of a merry forest life were soon to be dispelled. Now they were to learn that Eobin Hood had not been the most favoured of mortals, and that most likely, if the offer had been made him, he would willingly have quitted the romantic delights of the " greenwood shade " for the more solid enjoyments of a well- roofed dwelling. For the first time they were to learn by experience that B-obinson Crusoe on his desert island led a life of privation, compared with which a workhouse existence was one of luxury and enjoyment. After running for at least an hour, and darting through briers and underwood till their hands and faces were torn with thorns, the three young scamps came to a halt. The first thing th^y did was to hunt for a place to pass the night in, and great was their surprise to find the ground wet and soddened with the past rains, so that even the pressure of the foot brought the water up to the surface like squeez- ing a sponge. PAYED WITH GOLD. 67 "I say, I don't half like this," said Phil, with a disappointed look ; and turning to Billy Fortune, he added, " I thought you said there was lots of dry moss here ?" "So there is, you silly, when you've dried it," retorted Master Fortune. Ned Purchase stammered out something about going back again, but was soon "silenced by the redoubted Billy. "You may go if you like," he said, " only it's all found out before this ; and won't you get a licking — rather ! You'll have to take our share and your own too, I can tell you." The runaways tried to light a fire, and one by one the lucifera were held to the decayed leaves, but without success. To console themselves, they sat down on a bent bough, and tried to raise their drooping spirits by planning the delicious future that awaited them as soon as they dare leave the wood and start for Portsmouth. Al- ready they were on shipboard, pulling at ropes and letting out sails ; or else they were catching flying-fish, or watching the changing colours of the dying dolphin. Now they were landing on some island where they were all received with the greatest kindness by the black inhabitants, and even welcomed by the king himself. After feasting on sugar-cane and delicious fruits, they were to return to their own country laden with presents consisting chiefly of diamonds the size of eggs, and lumps of gold as big as quartern loaves. " Catch me giving that old drill-master any, that's all," cried Billy Fortune, as earnestly as though his dreams had been realised. When the twilight came, the truants eat the bread they had brought with them, but it had grown so hard with being kept in the pocket that it broke like biscuit. Neither was there enough even to take the " edges" off their appetites. " Oh, I've got such a pain here," said Billy Fortune, pressing his stomach ; " I never felt so hungry in all my life. It's the running's done it !" " Chew some leaves, they're just like spinach," suggested Ned Pur- chase to the disgusted William. " You said we should find blackberries and birds' eggs," exclaimed Phil, reproachfully. They found some amusement in imagining to themselves the sensa- tion their absence had created in the school when the name list was called over at night. From the place where they were sitting they could hear the big school-bell ring for supper, and afterwards for bed- time. They watched all the lights in the different windows of the building, trying to find out by them which was their dormitory. Then came wonderings as to what " So-and-so was doing," or "what the head-master had said," and whether any search would be made for them that night. At last Billy Fortune declared he could stand his " awful hunger" no longer. He vowed he was starving, and that as he had often read that was the worst death possible, he was determined to do some- thing desperate rather than dwindle slowly to a skeleton. When his companions saw him jump up from the ground as if he meant to leave them, they both began to charge him with being the cause of their present suffering, and the first to " turn tail." f2 68 • PAVED WITH GOLD. " That's all you know about it," shouted Bill, brutishly. " I shall be back again in an hour, only I can't stand this beastly hunger. I've got a plan for freeing us all, I tell you. . I'm only going back to the school to get some grub. I know the place where it's kept, and there's a window quite handy in the wall. All a feller's got to do is just to put in his arm and help hisself. So just keep your hearts up and never say die, and I'll be back in less than no time with some jolly new bread, which is the primest eating in the world, to my fancy." And, despite their entreaties that he would not run so great a risk, off went the stubborn lad. " Do you think he'll blab if he's caught ?" said Phil, nervously, as if he half suspected the answer. "Yes," replied Ned. Now that they dare neither of them go to sleep for fear that the marauder should be detected and their hiding-place hunted after, it was as much as they could do to keep their eyes open. They knew it was far in the night by the long time since it had been dark. They grew nervous, too, thinking of robbers — poor workhouse lads ! Neither of them had spoken a word for more than an hour — and, in- deed, each had imagined the other to be asleep — when Ned suddenly cried out, " What's that, Phil ? Did you hear anything ?" Phil answered " No ;" but he spoke in a whisper, for he had heard the whistle plainly enough. Before another second had passed, Ned Purchase, breathless with fear, pointed to some lights moving in the wood not a hundred yards off. Phil was on his feet in a moment. " That sneak, Fortune !" he muttered ; " he has gone and blabbed where we are. Come on, Ned ; let's cut as hard as we can." Ned Purchase was nearly frozen, and the stump of his leg was aching with the cold. " I can't stir, Phil," he said. "You go ! Grood-by ! We shall meet again some time." Phil gave the cripple his crutch, and seized hold of him to help him up. "Do you think I'd leave you?" he cried. "Quick! Jump up like a man. I'll help you on." " No, let me be, Phil," said Ned, with the tears streaming down his cheeks. "How could a one-legged chap like me get clear off? Hark ! they've got dogs with them. Cut ! cut ! Do, Phil ; I should only die if I followed you. Run, run ! here they are." Phil looked round, and among the dark trees he saw the lights moving about like monster fire-fiies. He could hear the rustling of the bushes being pushed aside, and off he darted, shouting out a " Grood-by, dear Ned," as he bounded in the black wood. The street-lamps had just been lighted when -a boy wet through with the rain, and dragging his feet after him as if he had hardly strength to raise their weight, crept along the pathway leading to the Elephant and Castle. Then coming suddenly to a halt, he stood PAYED WITH GOLD. 6Q staring about him as if dismayed at the sight of the several roads branching off in front. It was such a night that no one who had a home to go to would think of loitering about. Even those who had umbrellas ran along the pavement to escape as fast as possible from the rough weather. But though the rain came down with a force that made it splash up again from the stones, there the lad stood, looking down the long vista of bright lamps, and staring before him almost as intently as a sailor on the look-out at sea. Poor Phil ! he was his own master at last ! He was free to go where he liked and do what he pleased, and yet, with all the world before him, he dared not trust himself to advance a foot lest it should lead him into evil and suffering. And now what is to become of him ? The streets of London make, at the best, but a stony-hearted parent, the gutter forming but a sorry cradle for foundling babes to be reared in. The " back slums " of the metropolis are poor academies for youth, and moral philosophy is hardly to be picked up under " dry arches " and in "padding kens." CHILDHOOD IN THE STEEETS. CHAPTEE I. THE START IN LIFE. " Heee, my coveys," cried a suspicious-looking youth, as he entered the kitchen of one of the low lodging-houses near the Mint, " I've caught a young flat what's been and hooked it from the House at JSor'ud. He didn't know where to stall to in the huey. I found him out in the main toper, and told him to step it along with me, for I was going into a ken in the back drum. Just twig his bunch of fives, Conkey" (this was said to a gentleman with a peculiar bottle- nose). " S'elp me ! if a mauley like that there ain't worth a jemmy a day to a kenobe at wiring. Why, they're just made for hooking a fogle out of a clye." Poor Phil Merton, to whom the above unintelligible jargon re- ferred, stood in the centre of the wretched room trembling with fright at the strange and dismal character of the place, as well as the savage-looking people he had just been introduced to. The purport of the above communication, though incomprehensible to most people, was not so to one who was known among the gang 70 PAVED WITH GOLD. as Yau Diemen Bill, and who sat by the fire swathing his. bare ulcerous feet in a long roll of rags. He, however, was sufficiently well versed in " cant " to know that it meant to say that the strange boy couldn't tell where to get a lodging in town, and that " Buck" (the name of the lad who had brought Phil to the house) had found him in the high road, and told him to come with him, as he was going to a lodging-house in one of the by-streets. He knew, moreover, that Buck had drawn his friend Conkey's attention to the delicacy of the boy's hand, declariug that such a one was worth a sovereign a day to a thief at picking pockets, and adding that Phil's fingers were made expressly for hooking out handkerchiefs. The speech, however, had hardly been finished before Van Diemen Bill had suddenly slipped on the old shoes at his side, and, going towards Buck, said, as he folded his arms and looked at him surlily in the face : " Shut up, will you— shut up, now ! I tell you, you ain't a-going to make a gun (thief) of this here young flat ; it's a bad game, you know as well as I do, and I won't stand by and see a mere kid like this here put in the way of being lagged or scragged (transported or hanged) as he i3 sure to be at last if he goes on the cross like us. Tou knows, Buck, as well as I do, that we leads the life of dogs. Arn't we all on us spotted (marked) here ? and ain't the Bobbies at our heels directly we stirs a foot, so that we can't even do a kingsman (silk handkerchief) in a day, let alone a skin or a soup (a purse or watch) ? Stand back!" he shouted, as Buck appeared to make an advance towards the lad, " and leave the kid alone, or I'll put out my Chalk Farm (my arm) and give you a rap with my Oliver Twist (fist) over your I suppose (nose) that'll flatten your chevy chase (face) for you !" he added, menacingly, between his teeth, as he shook his clenched hand in the air. Then stooping down to the scared lad, he said, in as tender tones as he was capable of: " Come with me, young 'un, this ain't no place for you ; they're all on the cross here ; and you must keep square, my lad — keep square, whatever you do!" And so saying, the old thief seized Phil by the arm and led him out of the house — much to the astonishment of the younger and less squeamish rogues infesting the place. Nor was there anything very extraordinary in such an act ; for let us say, for the honour of such characters, who are generally con- sidered to be utterly dead to every kindly feeling, that we ourselves have had honest boys brought to us by old returned convicts, and that solely from a disposition to save the lads from leading the same life as their own, for none but the very basest of- thieves seem to wish others to be like themselves ; and it is by no means uncommon for a person to hear, when some one of the fraternity says he has made up his mind, and is " going to square it" (live honestly for the future), the others, one and all, exclaim, " Well, I'm glad on it ; I only wish I could'do the same !" To say the truth, Van Diemen Bill had led such a life of suffering and crime that now, in his advanced age, when he found himself no longer capable of the more daring exploits by which heavy " swag'? PAVED WITH GOLD. 71 (plunder) could be obtained, and too closely watched by the police to be capable of any of the minor thefts, he felt angry at the thought of any young lad being trained to a life like his. It was impossible, as he said, for such as him to get work, and neither could he steal — indeed, it was only by continued " friendly leads" (subscriptions) among his old pals, and the gathering of the few bits of rag and bones from the muck-heaps in the streets, that he was enabled to eke out life at all. Phil was no sooner in the street than the man led him hurriedly away to a low public-house in the neigbourhood ; and there, entering the little tap, that was so dark that the gas was always kept burning during the day-time, he said : " Come, lad, have a bit o' scran, and I'll stand a shant o' gatter, I've got a teviss here;" and then, suddenly remembering that he was no longer talking to one of his own fraternity, he added, " I meant to say, have a bit of this here vittals, and I'll pay for a pot of beer, I've got a sixpence. A party as is kind to me on my rounds gave me some broken bits and an old jacket this morning, and I sold the jacket to the dolly-man for a bob. So come, eat now, boy, you needn't be afraid of me ; for, though I'm a thief, I wouldn't harm the hair of your head — that I wouldn't." Phil looked up in the old convict's face, and in the corner of his eye he could see a bright tear drop shimmering against the swarthy skin. Had the boy been more knowing as to the lives and characters of such people, he might have guessed that some recollection of his early home, or a dead parent's advice, had suddenly flashed across his mind ; but the soft thief's hand was rubbed hastily over the brow, and the ugly memory shaken out of the brain with a half shudder and toss of the head. The sight of the tear, however, inspired Phil with some little faith in the humanity of his companion, and assured him more than any words could do that the man really had some feeling for him. In a few minutes the handkerchief of broken victuals was spread upon the table, and Phil was eating heartily, for the first time that day, and sipping occasionally at the half-pint of threepenny ale that his kindly, if not honest, friend had supplied to him. Nor was it long before the convict had learnt from the runaway workhouse lad his whole story, and more especially how, as he stood loitering about the Elephant and Castle, the lad Buck had accosted him, and finding him without a lodging, had promised to provide him with one if he would follow him to his home. The story ended, Phil could hardly help giving way to his feelings, and sobbed aloud in his alarm at the danger he had been in. " There, there, boy," said Van Diemen Bill, " you must keep your pluck up whatever you do. Come, now, I'll tell you what I mean you to try. All I can give you, my good lad, is a sixpence ; and if it hadn't been for the old coat I got this morning I couldu't have done that. Howsomever, the sixpence you're welcome to, and thank Grod it was honestly come by for your sake. Well, you see, twopence of it will find your bed to-night, and with the other fourpence you must begin a-trading upon. You may stare, but at the place where 72 PAYED WITH GOLD. I'm going to send you to, there's many a poor soul whose stock money is only a penny, and yet they can manage to keep them- selves out of the workhouse, or the gaol too, by turning that small sum over and over again. Ah ! in that place twopence is enough to keep a lad like you for a year or two, and there's many an old couple has lived on even less for a much longer time. Well, I'll tell you," said the man, " for I see you're all eyes to know what it is, — it's the water-crease market I means to send you to. I'll get you an old tin tray at the ' Dolly,' Tuses, and start you fair with this here sixpence ; and mind you, if ever you touches your stock money, if you eats a farden of it, you're a lost mutton you are. Take my advice, lad — the advice of a man who has seen more trouble, perhaps, than any other cross-chap in London — and starve on and on rather than make your fourpence a farden less ; for remember it's only by making it more that such as you can ever hope to keep out of a prison that has even now got its jaws ready wide open to receive you." A few moments after the above scene had taken place the boy had been furnished with his tin tray, and was launched fairly into the wide world of London, with sixpence to trade upon in his pocket and an old thief's blessing on his head. CHAPTEE II. THE WATER -CRESS MARKET. „.The retail trad e in water-cre sses is followed by the very poorest of the poor, as the stock-money for this calling need consist only of a few halfpence. This class of street-sellers are generally honest, in- dustrious, striving people, and consist of young children who have been deserted by their parents, and whose strength is hardly equal to any great labour, or old men and. women crippled by disease or acci- dent, who, in their dread of a workhouse, linger on with the few pence they earn by street selling. The children are mostly sent out by their parents " to get a loaf of bread somehow," and the very old take to it because they are unable to carry heavy loads, and anxious to avoid becoming positive paupers in their old age. " I'd do anything," said one, " rather than go into the house. I'd sweep crossings, or anything; and I should have been there long ago if it had not been for my wife selling creases." The young boys and girls are said to be well-behaved, and to be mostly the children of poor struggling people. The old and young generally travel between nine and ten miles in the course of the day. They start off to market at four and five, and are out on their morn- ing rounds from seven to nine, and their afternoon ones from half- past two till five in the evening. PAYED WITH GOLD. 73 At the lodging-house to which Van Diemen Bill had taken young Phil to get him a bed for the night, the boy met with an old woman, who told him all about the trade he was in future to live by. She was sitting before the kitchen fire, toasting a herring for her supper, and seeing that Phil carried a little tin tray under his arm, she at once recognised the symbol of the water-cress trade, and said to him, " I suppose you're at creases, young un ? Done pretty well to- day ? I'm in the line myself." " I've never sold in the streets yet," answered Phil ; and then he told her the story of the great peril he had just run, and how the old convict had behaved to him. " Well, that Yan Diemen Bill is a kind cretur, and bless him for it, though I ain't the pleasure o' knowing him," said the old crone. " And how much do you say he guv you ? Eourpence ! You ought to do uncommon well on that, for there's very few on us got more than twopence or threepence, and lots on 'em only a penny. Why, let me see, for a penny you ought to have a full market hand, or as much, as I can take hold of at one time without spilling ; for threepence you should have a lap full enough to earn about a shilling off; and for fourpence you gets as many as I can cram into my basket." " Then I shall make a lot of money," smiled Phil. " Well, my dear," she continued, " it ain't so easy to earn a mouth- ful of bread. Many a time I've walked through the streets, and when I've seed a bit of old crust, as the servant has chucked out of the door — maybe for the birds^-thinks I to myself, ' I can enjoy that as much as the sparrers.' Besides, it takes a deal a laming to buy your goods properly. Ha ! ha !" she chuckled, " the dealers can't take me in, though. When one on 'em tries to give me a small hand of creases, I says, ' I ain't a-going to have that for a penn'orth,' and I moves to the next basket, and so on all round ; and that's what you must do, I can tell you." " Oh ! they shan't cheat me," said Phil, knowingly. " Are you fond of getting up early ?" asked the old woman ; but without waiting for a reply, she went on : " It don't matter if you do or no if you wants to live by selling creases. I gets up in the dark, by the light of the lamp in the court, and ain't it cold in winter ! It pains my poor hands dreadful to take hold on the creases, 'specially after we've pumped on 'em to wash 'em. You're a strong boy, and won't mind the cold so much, as us old folk. Ah, it's the poor children, too, I pities in winter time. Poor babes, they make my heart ache to see 'em without shoes, and their pretty feet quite blue with the frost, so that many on 'em don't know how to set one foot afore the other, but stands still and cries with the cold, poor dears !" Phil was beginning to get rather alarmed at the picture the old woman was drawing of the privations and sufferings connected with the business he was about to adopt. "But I thought there was very few selling creases in the streets r" he interposed. " Yery few !" exclaimed the old thing — " very few ! Why, where's 74s PAVED WITH GOLD. the lad lived all his days ? I tell you, the market's crammed with 'em of a morning buying their stock. In summer-time I've seed 'em so thick that you might a'most bowl balls along their heads, and there they are all a-fighting for the creases, making a reg'lar scramble to get at 'em, so as to turn a halfpenny out of 'em. Why, I should think at this time of the year there's as many as four or five hundred on 'em down at Parringdon Market all at one time, between four and five in the morning, and as fast as they keep going out others keep coming in. Ah! if I was to say there's a thousand young and old folks in the street crease-trade, I should be under the mark." " A thousand !" exclaimed Phil, with a downcast look. " I shall never be able to do nothing if there's such a lot as that." " Nothin' like trying, my lad," continued the crone, quite delighted to have some one to listen to her. " Tou must push along as all of us does. Now, I finds places where big buildings is going on very good for selling at, and you must hunt for them. When the car- penter and bricklayer goes to breakfast at eight o'clock, they enjoys a relish with their bread. Then again, courts and little streets is very tidy selling, but mews is the places. They're first-rate. Why coachmens' families should be so very partial to creases, I can't say, but they is. Perhaps it's the smell of the horses does it." " I thought everybody liked creases," ventured Phil, who, from having lived at a workhouse school all his life, had never tasted them, and, indeed, had rather a confused notion of what the vegetable was like. 1 " Thank Hevin !" answered the woman, " creases has their attractions. They're reckined good for sweetening the blood in the spring-time, you see ; though, for my own eating, I'd sooner have the crease in the winter than I would at any other time of the year." Phil and his aged tutor were soon dead to all their troubles, and as happy in their slumbers as the richest and proudest of the land ; and, leaving them there, we will close the old dame's account of the trade by a fact of our own gathering. There are, we learned, from accounts rendered to us by the sales- men at the different green-markets of London, upwards of six millions and a half of bunches of water-cresses sold annually in London ; and these, at the retail price of one halfpenny a bunch, gives a sum of nearly 14,000Z. for the amount spent annually in water-cresses throughout London; then, dividing this amount by the gross number of street- sellers, it shows a weekly receipt of 5s. 5d., and a weekly profit of 3s. 3d. accruing to each individual — a fact which proves, not only how small is the capital required by this trade, but how terribly limited are the earnings of the poor creatures engaged in it. Next morning Phil and the old woman were up and out in the streets while the stars were shining coldly in the silver-grey sky. As they passed on their way the streets were all deserted, and the policeman, in his long great-coat, busy throwing the light of his bull's-eye on the doors and parlour-windows as he passed on his PAYED WITH GOLD. 75 rounds, making the panes flicker with the glare as if a jack-a-dandy had been cast on them. On the cab-stands, as they went shivering along, they found but one or two crazy cabs left — the horses dozing, with their heads down to their knees, and the drawn-up windows of the vehicle covered with the breath of the driver sleeping inside. Then they encountered the early coffee-stall keeper, with his large coffee-cans dangling from either end of the yoke across his shoulders, and the red fire shining through the holes in the fire-pan beneath, like spots of crimson foil. Next, a butcher's light chaise- cart rattled past, on its way to the early meat-markets, with the men huddled in the bottom of the vehicle, behind the driver, all with their coat-collars turned up, dozing as they drove along. Then some tall and stalwart brewer's drayman walked by (for these men are among the first in the streets), in his dirty, drab, flushing jacket, red night-cap, and leathern leggings, hastening towards the brewery ; whilst here and there they came to a bone-grubber, in his shiny grimy tatters, with a lantern in his hand, " routing" among the precious mud-heaps for rich rags and valuable refuse, before the scavengers were abroad to disturb them. Strange and almost fearful was the silence of the streets at that hour ; so still, indeed, that Phil could hear the heavy single knock, followed by the shrill cry of some distant chimney-sweeper, echoing through the desolate thoroughfares as the sooty lad waited at the door and shrieked " Swe-e-eep !" to rouse the sleeping cook-maid. At one house, by the way, there stood a man with dirty boots and loose, disordered hair, as if he had just left some saloon, giving sharp and loud single knocks, then stepping out into the road to look at the bedrooms, and see if a light was yet stirring within them. On reaching the market, the shops all round about are shut. The gaslights over the iron gates burn brightly, and every now and then is heard the half-smothered crow of some cock caged in a neighbouring shed or bird-fancier's back parlour. By slow degrees the street-sellers come creeping up in every style of rags, one after another, towards the gates. They shuffle up and down in front of the railings, stamping to warm their feet, and rub- bing their hands together till they grate like hearth-stoning. Some of the boys have brought large hand-baskets, and carry them with the handles round their neck, so that the basket covers their head as with a wicker hood. Others have their " shallows " fastened to their back with a strap, the holes at the bottom of some of the baskets having been darned with rope or string, and others being lined with oilcloth or old pieces of sheet tin. One little girl, with the bottom of her gown tattered into a fringe like a blacksmith's apron, stands shiver- ing in a large pair of old drab cloth boots, holding in her blue hands a bent and rusty tea-tray. A few poor creatures make friends with the coffee-man, and are allowed to warm their fingers at the burning charcoal under the can; as the heat strikes into them they grow sleepy, and yawn. Phil and the old crone, with her rags and thin shawl drawn tightly about her, join in the crowd, the boy staring and being stared at by all around. 76 PAYED WITH GOLD. As the church clocks are striking five, a stout saleswoman, well wrapped in her shawl and cloak, enters the gates, and instantly a man in a waggoner's cap and smock sets to work arranging the baskets he lias brought up to London. One dealer has taken his seat, and remains with his hands in the pockets of his grey driving-coat. Before him is an open hamper, with a candle fixed in the middle of the bright green cresses, and as the light shines through the wicker sides of the basket it casts curious patterns on the ground. Now the business commences ; the customers come in by twos or threes, and walk about looking at the cresses or bending over the hampers, the light tinting their swarthy faces, while they jingle their halfpence and speak coaxingly to the dealer, to wheedle him into giving them good bargains. The saleswomen sit with their hands under their apron and their feet in an apple- sieve, talking to the loungers, whom they call by their names as if they had long known, them. Every one is now pushing about, the children crying as their naked feet are trodden upon, and the women hurrying off with their baskets or shawls filled with cresses, and the bunch of rushes for tying them up dangling from their hands. At one basket a street-seller, in an old green cloak, has spread out a rusty shawl to receive her bunches, and by her stands her daughter, in a thin cotton dress, patched like a quilt. " Ah ! Mrs. Dolland," asks the saleswoman, in a gracious tone, 11 can you keep yourself warm ? It bites the fingers like biling water, it do." At another basket an old man, with long grey hair streaming over a rusty cape, is complaining " as to how he bought a lot of creases the other morning of one of the saleswomen, and found, when daylight came, they was quite white, so that he only made threepence on his very best day. " "Well, Joe, you should always come to those as knows you and treats you well," was the answer. As the morning twilight came on, the pigeons began to fly about and walk along upon the more deserted parts of the market. »At length the crowd thinned, and none but the very poorest of the cress- sellers were left. Many of these had come without money, while others had their one • or two halfpence tied up carefully in their shawl ends, as though they dreaded the loss of their little all. A sickly-looking boy, hardly more than five years old, with the bare skin showing in gashes through the rents in his clothes, now crept forward, treading with his blue naked feet as a cat does over wet ground. The wretched child stole up to the saleswoman, and said, " Give us a few old creases, Jinney;" and the moment after off he ran with a great bundle under his arm. At another stall an old dame, who, from her rags seemed to be beyond the possibility of obtaining credit, was paying for some cresses she had long since been trusted with. " Well, we couldn't lose much by giving credit, sir, if they was all of 'em to keep away," said the saleswoman, in answer to a question PAVED WITH GOLD. 77 as to the honesty of the poor frequenting the market ; " but they are generally honest and pay back, and even often remind us of trust we have given them and forgotten. Whenever we do lose anything it's mostly by the very poor ones ; though it ain't their fault, poor things, for when they stops away from here it's either the workhouse or the churchyard that keeps them from coming any more." To visit the Parringdon water-cress market is the best of all ways indeed to make oneself acquainted, with the fortitude, honesty, and perseverance of the poor. These wretched cress-sellers belong to a class so terribly poor, that temptation must ever haunt them like an evil spirit ; and yet they can be trusted without fear of their failing to pay the few pence they owe, even though they hunger for it. It must require, too, no little energy of conscience on the part of the boys and girls frequenting this market to resist the luring advice of those they meet at the low lodging-houses. And yet they prefer the early rising — the walk to market with naked feet along the cold stones — the ten miles walk to earn the few halfpence— and the pinched meal when they are earned — to the thief's or wanton's easier life. Verily the heroism of the unknown poor is a thing to set the dullest marvelling ; and in no place in all London is the virtue of the humblest, both young and old, so conspicuous as among the water- cress buyers of Parringdon-market. After the street-sellers have bought the cresses, they generally take them to some neighbouring pump to wet them. This is done to make them look fresh all the morning, and so that the wind shouldn't cause them to " flag," for having been packed in a hamper all night they get dry; moreover, the " hand," or quantity in which they are bought, has to be parcelled out into six halfpenny bunches. Some do this as they walk along, while others sit in one corner of the market upon the bare stones, with their legs curled up under them, and the ground round about green with the leaves they have thrown away. In the summer one may see hundreds of poor things, youii^ and old, sitting, thick as crows in a corn-field, tying their bunches up in the market. Many, however, go and sit on the steps of St. Andrew's Church, in Holborn, and there make up their stock of green meat into " ha'porths." There are crowds of poor little souls to he seen there of a morning between five and six. It was to this spot that young Phil, and the old dame who had undertaken to instruct him in the mysteries of the business, had be- taken themselves. There they were, seated amid a bevy of old and - young, all busy tying up their water-cresses, and chatting the while to one another over the gossip of the market and the trade. " I didn't see little Mary M'Donald this morning," said one ; " I suppose her father's gone back to ' brick-laying' again. Poor feller ! it's a load upon a man having eight small children to feed, and out of work half his time. Mary's the oldest on 'em, and a very good girl she is to pick up ha'pence." " And I ain't for a long time set eyes on Louisa as goes along with her," chimed in an old man, who had one side of his face paralysed; 78 PAVED WITH GOLD. " perhaps her feet's burst "out agin. Let's see, she ain't got ne'er a father, have she ? She's as fine a gal for twelve as ever I met with." " I remember Louisa's father well," said an old seafaring man ; " he was a carpenter by trade. It was he as put me up to this werry crease- selling when times was bad, and he was obligated to turn to it hisself." " Did you notice poor Mrs. Saunders a-crying this morning ?" inquired a sickly-looking girl, who had evidently been a maid-servant, of the woman next her ; " the parish only buried her husband yester- day, and last night she was turned out of her lodging. Ah ! it's hard upon a 'oman near seventy." And so they went on chatting, the only subject they cared to talk about being their miseries. Many complained of their ailments, and described their pains and sores as minutely as if they were being cross-examined by a doctor. Sickness was a favourite theme with the aged, and they were evidently trying to outvie each other in picturing the acuteness of their sufferings. One declared he had been told at the dispensary that his case was the worst ever known, and he was quite proud of it. Another made herself famous by stating that she had been sent from the hospital as incurable. Others, determined to take some share in the general conversation, detailed their coughs, or the operations they had undergone, or the medicines they had taken for this or that disease. "With the hale the discourse took a different turn, and was generally about "the days when they were better off." Mechanics, too old for work, moaned and sighed over the times when they could earn " their six shillings easy." Ruined dressmakers bragged of the number of hands they had once employed, and of the rich ladies for whom they had worked. The eyes of one crook-backed creature brightened again as he boasted of having " always lived as footman in the fust of families," and a reduced laundress, throwing up her head with pride, talked of the time when " she kept her cart, and bought creases 'stead of selling them." The little children were the only ones who talked about water- cresses. With them "good bargains" and getting pennies for ha'porths, were what they best liked to chat over. If ever the theme was changed it was to gossip about eating, and then adventures were told of how " a big bit of pudding with gravy over it," had been pro- cured through a very ingenious method of making somebody buy the stock of cresses at double their price. "When Phil, by dint of watching how the little girls twisted the rushes round each farthing bunch, had " dressed up" his tray as well as he could, he started off on his rounds to make his first attempt at street selling. The lad, who was strong and healthy, startled the old people by the vigorous way in which he went to work, crying, " four bunches a penny, water-creases." " He's got a woice, ain't he ?" said a broken-down coster, who had lost his own. " Ah ! creases 'ill soon take it out on him," replied a wretched old crone, whose trembling hands were as transparent as smelts. PAVED WITH GOLD. 79 For the first day or two Phil only just managed to pick up sufficient halfpence to buy mere bread. At night he slept along with a number of other lads in a half-finished house. Many a time as he lay on the hard ground did he long for his soft bed at his old school, and wish that he had never listened to the wild dreams of Billy Fortune. It was a little girl of eight who first taught Phil the knack of street selling, and how, if he would succeed, he must force people to buy his green-meat. She was herself as clever a little saleswoman as ever made up a farthing bunch, but she was so small and weak that often the boys in the streets, half jealous of her success, would try to drive her from their quarter of the town — indeed it was in protecting her that Phil first made her acquaintance. She had asked him whether she might stop by him or even walk after him, for he seemed to her to be the kindest and bravest boy she had ever met with. She was a thin, stunted child, with a face white for want of food, and wrinkled where the dimples ought to have been, and she sighed con- tinually, as if overwhelmed with trouble. She half-frightened Philip by the calm earnestness with which she talked of the bitterest struggles of life, for she made him fancy that he, in his turn, would also have to endure them. This child- woman of the world soon saw that Phil was no adept at cress selling. " I say," she cried, when Phil turned away from the shops at the first denial, — " I say, you musn't do that I You see I'll go and sell 'em a bunch !" And to work she went, begging and curtseying, so that at last the coin was given more in pity, or to get rid of her, than for the sake of her goods. " Hard work to sell any, ain't it ?" said Phil to her one day. 11 Ah! it's nothing to what it is in the middle of winter," was the quick reply of the street baby ; " Then people says, * take your creases away, they'll freeze our bellies.' I've had then to go so long without eating that I was ill one day in the puddin.shop from the smell of the meat." Phil felt horrified, and cried out • " You're always talking in that way, Ellen! It's enough to make a chap quite afreard of you." Then, in a reproachful voice, he added : " I never yet seed you laugh- ing ; why don't you ?" " Where's the good of laughing ?" she replied. " But don't you never play, nor nothink ?" asked the lad. " Yes, sometimes of an evening we has a game of ' honey-pots' with the gals in our court ; but it don't make me laugh, cos going out with the creases tires me." • "Then, why don't you go to bed if you're tired?" remonstrated Phil. " Well, there's mother's room to put to rights," was the answer. " I cleans the two chairs, and I takes a flannel, and scrubbing-brush, and does the floor." " But you're a killing yourself," insisted the boy. " Oh, no, I ain't!" was the calm reply. " It was much wuss in the winter, and that ain't killed me, you see." 80 PAVED WITH GOLD. Struggle as Phil would, lie could never manage to put by anything out of his daily earnings. It is true, he had grown quite an adept at his work, and instead of sleeping under dry arches could now afford to return to his twopenny bed at the lodging-house, but he found it difficult to pay for his day's scanty food, and yet not draw upon his little stock-money. By dint of entering shops and following old ladies, as tea-time drew near, he could always get rid of the contents of his tray and so double his fourpence. But two-pennyworth of bread doesn't go far with a growing boy, and many a night he had gone to rest as early as the lodging-house-keeper would let him, so as to sleep his hunger off, and avoid the temptation of spending the money that Van Diemen Bill had given him. Indeed, it was only fear of the old convict that kept him from "breaking into" his little bank, and ending his water- cress life with a good gorge of hot food. But at last the day did come. It rained when poor Phil trudged early to market, with his tray over his head in lieu of an umbrella. The wet seemed to have cast a chill upon all water- cress eaters, for though he walked, about the entire morning, he had only sold four bunches, and that was to a man at a public-house, who had drunk himself into a fever. He tried all his old " rounds," bat everywhere he met with the same answer of " No ! it's too cold to-day, my boy." "When, in the evening, he sat down in a gateway to count his "takings," he found that he had only fourpence in his pocket, the same as when he went to market in the morning. Poor Phil's legs were aching with fatigue so severely, that he almost fancied the shin-bones had given way, and w r ere bulging out with the weight of his body. Still he went to work again, hobbling and shouting out with all his might, and grew so energetic in his endeavours to get rid of his stock, that he made tempting offers to all faces looking over parlour-blinds, or full-length figures standing at drawing-room windows, or heads seen down areas. He even went so far as to attempt a sale with a footman cleaning some third-floor windows, but the man declined to purchase, shouting back in answer that he " always bought his creases wholesale — by the ton." Determined not to give in until he was positively forced, Phil crept towards the mews at the back of the squares, hoping that he might be able to tempt the coachmen's wives with large pennyworths. He caught two or three women taking in for the night the linen that had been drying on the pole over the hay-loft door, but, though he increased his lots to five bunches a halfpenny, still they wouldn't listen to him. One, indeed, did look dow r n to examine the contents of his tin tray, but it was only to abuse them by saying, " They were turned as black as tea-leaves, and he ought to be given in charge for trying to pisen people." Tor the moment the idea crossed Phil's head that everybody had taken a sudden dislike to him, and was determined to crush him ; but he wouldn't allow his courage to give way, but once more crawled back to the streets. He thought he would try what he could do by entering shops, and selecting one where an old lady was stitching PAVED "WITH GOLD. '81 behind the counter, he pushed back the door and nearly startled the dame out of her life by the suddenness with which he offered to let her have all his tray contained for the small sum of threepence. " Drat the boy," cried the lady, still panting with her fright, "and what do you think I'm to do with all that green stuff; I ain't a rabbit— am I ?" The lad, as it grew late, felt quite spirit-broken. He sat down on a door-step to rest himself and moan over his ill-luck. " Everybody can't have given up eating water- creases all of a sudden," he remarked to himself. " No, it's luck that's agin me, and is breaking a chap down ;" and as he, like most street-vendors, had grown to be a firm believer in the omnipotence of " luck," he felt convinced that he had better " give in at once, instead of tiring himself to bits and doing no good after all I" To make sure that his luck was really so resolutely opposed to his welfare, he took his fourpence out of his pocket and began tossing. He determined that if he won twice out of three throws, he would make one more attempt, but if he lost he would eat the water-cresses himself and give over for the day. The trial ended in Phil jumping up with fresh hope in his bosom, and away he trotted, shouting, " "Wa-a-ater-cre-e-ases, fine wa-a-ter-cre-e-ases !" as lustily as if he was making his first morning round. He trudged down Tottenham-court-road, and straight through St. Giles, up Drury-lane, as far as Long-acre, and yet his tray was not a bunch the lighter. He stopped at every pump to moisten the hanging leaves of his cresses into the semblance of freshness, but nobody would have anything to do with him or his goods. A kind of disgust for the world, and all the water-cress eaters in it, made Phil come to a sudden stand-still at a corner lamp-post, and, as he leaned against it, mutter out, " I wish I had never been born, nor nobody else neither." He remained in this position some time, picking off the dead leaves from his little bunches, and ruminating on the enormous drawbacks there were against the chances of earning a comfortable independence by selling water-cresses, when, on raising his eyes and looking about him, he observed a crowd gathered round a shop-window on the other side of the way. The window-panes were covered with a mist that almost made them seem like ground glass ; but the mob appeared to be very much interested in something that was going on within, and Phil, like a boy, in a moment forgot his sorrows in his curiosity, and crossing over made one of the lookers-on. It was a cook-shop — not a fashionable eating-house, where there are separate rooms for ladies ; where dead game and magnificent un- cooked joints of the finest meat are tastefully arranged before the wire-blind in the window ; nor was there a bill of fare framed and glazed at the door-post, with the dishes of the day written in a bold, round hand; no! it was a cook-shop wit^-the long window-board lined with pewter, in which wells had been sunk like small baths to receive the puddles of gravy in which joints of meat were perpetually steaming. There anybody who had twopence in his pocket could boldly purchase cooked flesh, only, instead of receiving it in a plate, it was handed to him in a piece of old newspaper, thereby combining G 82 PAYED WITH GOLD. intellectual enjoyments with animal indulgences, for the possessor, having eaten his dinner, might afterwards peruse a few of the events that happened the week before last. Behind the counter of this shop stood the cook himself, a sodden-looking man, with a face like a washerwoman's hand. Philip gazed on him with admiration, as in his suit of white linen he turned from joint to joint, brandishing a carving-knife, long and elastic as a harlequin's wand, and whipping off a half-moon slice from this leg, or whisking out a clever morsel from that shoulder. There was a pagoda of boiled beef, composed of some twenty pieces pegged into a pile with a metal skewer, till it reminded one of a file of receipted bills. There were legs of pork, from which the crackling was slowly barking off, peeling away with long steam- ing like the jacket of an over-boiled potato ; and there were legs of mutton with the sides scooped out like the shape of a lady's collar, and from them all rose a dense steam like that of a fire made with green wood, which condensed on the windows, ceiling, and walls of the shop, and then trickled in snake-like rivulets towards the floor again. Such sights as a cook-shop window may seem very sickening to those who have dinner always ready for them at six o'clock, but to poor Phil, who was so hungry with his sixteen hours' fast that he had been forced to drink cold water to allay the cramps in the stomach, the reeking steam that came up through the area railings and curled out at the entrance door, carried with it an odour which was perfume in his nostrils. The worst of it was that this smell of meat brought back again the longing for food which he thought he had drowned at the pumps, and the terrible hunger cramps again began to lay hold of his stomach, grasping it like a hand. He felt in his pocket, and commenced turning over mechanically the fourpence, which was all he possessed in the world. "I mustn't have anythink," he said to himself; "but I'll look at the meat, and perhaps the smell will make me feel sick, and then I shall be all right." He watched everybody that entered. He saw one man buy a plate full of scraps of meat, which, after they were shot into his handkerchief, he commenced eating whilst his change was being counted out. Another, a boy, bought some fried potatoes and held them in the hollow of his hands, which he shaped like a basin, and eat from as a horse would. Then poor Phil examined all the hot joints one after another. " There are some people eat meat like this every day," he couldn't help thinking, with envy. Presently one of the women servants in the shop hurried from the back, carrying before her an immense iron tray filled with smoking puddiug, which she placed on the window-board. This pudding Phil instantly recognised as being what lads call " plum-duff." The ap- pearance of this favourite delicacy created an immense sensation among the crowd outside. It was brown as varnished oak, and divided into large squares like a sample of tile-work. Several of the PAVED WITH GOLD. 83 youths near Phil were struck with the size of the pieces, and openly- expressed their approbation of the proprietor's liberality. "Ain't they big 'uns," observed one boy ; "and thick 'uns, too," he added, after taking another look. " With gravy it is just prime," remarked another, " and wonderful filling at the price." The rush which was made for this tempting pudding swept away all Phil's resolves to be prudent. He could not resist the tempta- tion, but gently yielding himself a prisoner to plum-duff, he was soon struggling among the mob at the counter, calling out as loud as the others, " Me, master, I was first, please." What are six inches square of savoury pudding to a lad who was up at four, and did not breakfast ? A pair of gloves in a carpet-bag, a baby in a railway carriage, a horse in a common ! When Phil had devoured his portion, he stood still for a while, and watched those who were still munching. The sight was too much for him, and cost him another penny. When he had eaten that to the last crumb, it had almost the same effect upon him as drink, and made him feel merry, and think what a silly fellow he had been to feel so cut up at his bad day's work, and nearly break his heart with disappointment, when, after all, his only misery was that he wanted something to eat. It struck him that the best friend he had met with that day was " plum-duff," and, determined not to part with so encouraging a companion until he was forced, he continued crossing the threshold of the cook-shop until his fourpence was spent. When the boy had finished his feast, he gave up his place on the steaming railings to those pushing behind him, and retired once more to the lamp-post over the way to digest his food and think upon what he was to do. His stock-money was gone, and it was useless to think any more about water-cress-selling. He had run through his little fortune, got rid of all his property, like a nobleman, by feasting, and now he must begin the world again. By the way in which he continued repeating inwardly to himself, " It can't be helped, it was no fault of mine," it would almost seem that Phil's mind was divided against itself, and that while one half was accusing him of extrava- gance, the other had undertaken his defence. He looked at the few water-cresses that remained on his tray. They had swollen and turned soft, so he leisurely tossed them bunch after bunch into the gutter. His greatest fear was lest Van Diemen Bill should by any means become acquainted with his banqueting ex- cesses. " He said he'd break my neck if I played him false, and I know he'd do it too," thought Phil. " Of course he'd never believe it was no fault of mine !'* To avoid the possibility of ever meeting with the eccentric patron, he determined upon retiring for a short time from all kinds of street life that would be likely to bring him in contact with the old con- vict's powerful arm. Where was he to sleep that night ? He couldn't pay for a night's lodging, and he knew nobody who could shelter him till morning. G 2 84 £AVED WITH GOLD. But lads turned loose in the street are seldom, when the nights are warm, at a loss for some corner in which to double themselves up and sleep. Like a dog that had strayed from its master, Phil, when it grew late, sauntered along, examining every place that he thought would make a convenient temporary bedstead. By good fortune he wandered into a stable-yard, and found a cart half filled with hay. He soon jumped into it, and placing his old water-cress-tray under his head by way of pillow, he was in a few minutes sleeping as soundly as if he rested on the softest feathers ever made into a bed, and dreaming that he was back again at his old school, walking round the playground arm-in-arm with JSTed Purchase. CHAPTEE III. CATEN-WHEELING AND HEAD-OVER-HEELS. The next morning Phil was roused from his sleep by a severe jolting, and on rubbing his eyes he found to his alarm that his bed- stead was moving. He had so completely covered himself with hay that when the men had put the horse to they had not perceived the youngster. Like a stupid fellow, Phil in his surprise gave a cry, which made the man at the horse's head turn round. " "What are you doing there ?" inquired the driver, throwing in such a big oath at the end of the sentence, that the boy instantly tried to scramble "over the cart's side and be off. But the man seized him by the arm before he could reach the ground. " I thought there was no harm sleeping on the hay," stammered Phil. " And how do you think cows is to eat hay after you've been a flattening of it? Do you think they likes their wittals warmed up?" Phil thought it better, instead of answering, to begin to whimper ; but it didn't help him much, for the carter, before he released his hold, gave him a couple of smart whacks with his whip-handle, which made the shoulders burn as if they had been branded. As the lad was scampering off, he suddenly remembered that he had left his tray behind him. " It was worth tuppence," he said to himself; and then he began to calculate'which was better — to try and recover his property, and run the risk of another thrashing, or to keep his body sound and lose thejmoney. As his shoulders were still smarting, he preferred letting his pocket suffer instead of his back. For four hours Phil wandered about the streets, scarcely knowing what to do to pass the time, for all the shops were closed, and there was nobody stirring. He leant against the posts, one after another and whistled all the tunes he knew. When the shop-boys began to take the shutters down, he found a r PAYED WITH GOLD. 85 great relief in examining the interior of the various establishments, and by his steady staring greatly annoyed some ladies at an outfitting warehouse, who all the time they were "dressing up" the window felt persuaded that he was a young thief watching for an opportu- nity to burst into the shop and carry off a good armful of the best fancy articles of wearing apparel. By-and-by, he earned a slice of bread and butter by assisting a sleepy-looking lad to polish the brass .name-plates and ornaments that embellished the front of a chemist's establishment. The sleepy boy made the first advances, by calling out, " I say, you there, do you want a job ?" It being entirely a matter of business, Phil answered, "What will you give us?" The heavy-eyed employer suggested that some of his master's rose drops would be a fair price for a fair morning's work, but Phil, having his suspicions of doctors' sweetstuff, suggested a more solid kind of food as his remuneration, and, the terms being accepted, he in a very short time frictioned up the dull brass till it shone like ormolu. It struck Phil that Trafalgar- square would be a nice airy spot for him to rest in whilst taking his morning's meal. It was close at hand, too, so that he needn't keep his breakfast waiting long. Observing one or two gentlemen in difficulties who were performing their morning's ablutions at the fountains, Phil determined upon imitating them, and having cleared away with his hand the film of soot and grease floating on the surface of the water, he made a clear place and ducked his head in and out till he was out of breath. After wiping his face in his cap, the boy chose for himself a granite post which the sun had warmed, and jumping on to its broad, round top, attacked his bread-and-butter with determination, biting out pieces as big as pigeon-holes. "When breakfast was over, finding his seat rather hard, he shifted his position to the railings round the statue of Charles the First at Charing-cross, and with the sun shining full upon him he gazed upon the world as calmly as if he had been in an arm-chair at a first-floor window. There was an old crossing-sweeper working at the mud, and clearing a path across the broad road by the statue ; and, as there were very few persons to stare at, Phil amused himself by watching him. He was a fat-nosed man, with a forehead so filled with dirty wrinkles that the dark waved lines resembled the grain of oak. His costume was of what might be called " the all sorts" kind, and from constant wear it had lost its original colour and had turned into a species of dirty green-grey hue. He seemed to have a passion for buttons, for his waistcoat was held together by a variety in glass, metal, and bone. He wore a turn-down collar over his coat, which was a dress one, long past its evening party-days, and faded into an ironmould colour. It fitted so marvellously tight that the stitches were stretching open like wickerwork. But the most singular portion of his toilet were his boots. They ere so much too long for him that the portion beyond the toes had 86 PAYED WITH GOLD. flattened down and turned up like a Turkish slipper, whilst the heel was worn iuto a wedge-shape which made the foot rest sideways, like a boat upon the shore. When the sweeper saw that Phil was watching him he seemed to grow uneasy, for he several times stopped in his work to wipe his face with a piece of 'old flannel and stare back again. At last he ad- vanced towards the boy. " You must have a werry 'andsome hindependence, my lively young cock salmon," he said, " for to spend the bloom of your days observing human natur." Phil didn't answer him, for he was busy watching the old fellow's exposed throat. It was brick-red, and the flesh, from age, had con- tracted over the muscles and windpipe, so that each time he swallowed, the whole of the throat seemed to move as the tight skin was drawn over the dents and ridges of the cartilage beneath. The crossing-sweeper, angry at meeting with no reply, continued : " You seems to have growed sarcy since you come into your pro- perty. I can tell yer what, my little spring raddish, you was bound 'prentice to laziness, and now you're out of your time, do-nuffin is your trade, you lazy young warmint." " I ain't lazy," mildly answered Phil. " I ain't got no work, worse luck. I'll help you, if you like." This offer so startled the old crossing-sweeper, that he rubbed his unshorn chin, on which the bristles stood up like the brass pegs on the barrel of a musical box. It made a noise like stroking a hair- brush, and the sound appeared to soothe him. " Here, let's see what you're made on," he said, after a time — " whether you're real solid flesh and blood, or mere spurious imita- shun and counterfeits. Take this broom, and let's see how you can polish off this side the stattey ;" and he pointed to the unswept por- tion of the road. Phil set to w r ork in a minute, thinking he was to have a penny for the job. The old man leant against the railings and criticised his labours, at the same time instructing the youth whenever he saw occasion. " Take your sweeps longer and firmerer, and give more play to yer helbows — that's it! Send the mud off yer broom with a jerk! The mud's as stiff and sticky as batter-pudding, and requires hartfulness — i very pretty ! Don't grind the broom down so uncommon wicious, or you'll have all them twigs wore down to stumps as quick as hair- cutten. Never mind getting hot, it saves firen, and a moist skin is wholesomest. "What are you about ? Can't you see where you're a goen. Keep the line, my lad, as straight and regular as wirtue's path, that's the way to be happy and get ha'pence." When Phil had made the crossing as " smooth and reglar as a hoilcloth passage" — to use his professional friend's words — he was summoned back to the statue, and both sat down against the railings. " I'm agreeably disappointed in you," said the old fellow. " I'm uncommon pleased with your condict. My name is Stumpy." Phil exclaimed " Oh !" and, now he knew what to call him, once PAVED WITH GOLD. 87 more examined Mr. Stumpy minutely, as if he were a curiosity. Feeling that a similar confidence was expected of him, he also told his name. " Philup ain't such a nice name as Thummus," said Mr. Stumpy, thoughtfully. "I once knowed a Philup as was borned without toes to his feet. I wish you'd been a Thummus." Phil tried to look as if he also was aware of the invaluable bless- ing he had lost. "Yes," continued Stumpy, "Thummus is more of a poetry name than yourn, and betterer to rhyme with, and, consekently, a sweeterer name. But never mind, Philup, we all has our trials, and werry lucky is those as is acquitted not guilty, discharge the prisoner." This little moral reflection cast a gloom on the conversation, to dispel which Phil asked whether Mr. Stumpy thought there was just then an opening in life for a youth who had set his heart upon be- coming a crossing-sweeper. " Well, Philup, you certainly 'ave got gifts and qualities, and the way you handled your broom just now give hopes of werry nattering promise," began Mr. Stumpy, in an affecting voice ; " but, bless you, sweeping ain't nothing to what it were. The only adwantage it have, as I can call to mention, is the remarkable small amount as is re- quired to set up shop. How much money have you got, Philup ?" Poor Phil, half ashamed of himself, confessed he hadn't a farthing. Mr. Stumpy seemed quite startled at the reply. For a few seconds his speech failed him. At last, with an effort, he said, in saddened tones, " Either your imperrence or your pluck is wonderful frothy, Philup. If you've no money, where' s your broom to come from ? How do yer expex to sweep ? Aire you to do it with a duster, or with, your hand, scoopways ? or does you expex brooms grows from seed, like cabbage and other stalky wegetables ?" " But if I had a broom ?" ventured Phil. " Philup, your notions is over-exacted !" continued Stumpy. "You're a good boy, with clean dispositions, which I saw you sluicing yourself like a pidgeon in the fountings not an hour sins, though you didn't use my washing-basin. That there is my dressing apartment," he added, pointing to one of the fountains, "and if the board of wurks was to pervide jack-towels and the loan of a hair- brush, it 'ud be the most convenientest in the uniwerse." Seeing Mr. Stumpy had wandered away from the subject, Philip gently led him back again to crossing-sweeping. " It's a hard life, and not much of a living for anybody," answered the old man. " As yer ain't a hincome-tax collector, I don't mind tellin' you I tuk one and eightpence yesterday, and that's an un- ing broom, and all you can yarn you may keep." " Oh, thank you," cried Phil. "And mind this here, Philup," continued Mr. Stumpy, "if you don't press the people you won't get nothing. They'll all say they ain't got no coppers, but don't believe it, and stick to 'em. If you 88 PAYED WITH GOLD. can cry easy, it's a werry good help. The women is the shabbiest ; they always uses the best of places and gives the least ; but stick to 'em all the same, and say your mother's took bad, or something affecting. The only place you has women on is the feelings. Say mother's queer and the baby dying o' thirst, and that may fetch a ha'penny." Mr. Stumpy continued to give his pupil all the advice he could, until the business of the day commenced, and called the professional gentleman away to his labours. Having cautioned Philip to watch him narrowly, he took up his station on the other side of the road. Philip watched Mr. Stumpy's conduct minutely, but, for the life of him, he could discover no very great display of art in the manner in which he obtained his money. The old man took up his stand on the other side of the road, and all he appeared to do was to touch his hat whenever anybody passed. It struck the lad that it was one of the easiest methods of earning a living that he had ever witnessed. Mr. Stumpy, when the time came for him to go to dinner, made, as he handed up his broom, a point of asking Phil whether he had observed the art with which he had coaxed this old gentleman or wheedled that old lady, or frowned at the young children; but although Phil expressed great admiration of the sweeper's tact, yet he coiild not remember witnessing it. Just as Mr. Stumpy was about to hobble off to the public-house where he took his meals, a boy came running up, shouting out, " I say, old Stumpy, I'll give a penny for your crossen whilst you're feeding." But, despite the offer, the old man remained true to his word, and answering, " You're too late, Jim," left Phil as his true and lawful representative during his absence. When Jim found his bid was refused, he eyed Phil savagely. " How much did you pay him ?" he asked. " I didn't pay him nothink ; he give it me," replied Phil. But Jim evidently had a poor opinion of old Stumpy's generosity, for he exclaimed, " None of yer lies ; don't try to come cramming of me ;" and sat down to nurse between his legs an old broom with a worn-out stump, which had been worked as round as a ball. Jim was a good-looking lad, with large eyes, whose whites shone out with extra brilliance on account of his face being a light slate colour with dirt. His hands were so black from want of washing, that anybody might with reason have imagined that he had been walnut-peeling, and stained them brow T n with the juice. His costume was light and easy, consisting of a blackened shirt with so many rents in it, that the only wonder was how he knew which one his head was to go through, and a pair of trousers as full of slits as a fly-catcher, so that they formed a kind of network, through which the flesh was seen. This young gentleman, with his legs curled up under him like a cat's, sat watching Phil, who, imitating Stumpy, had taken up his stand near the pavement, and was touching his cap to everybody. But the passengers passed by without giving anything, and Jim rolled about like a plaster tumbler, laughing with delight at the failure his rival Phil had made. At last he seemed to take pity on PAYED WITH GOLD. 89 the misfortunes of the novice, for he crossed over the road, and, tap- ping him on the shoulder, said, " It's easy to see you ain't been, up to this game long. Why, you ain't no good at all !" " I don't know why they won't give me anythink," stammered the downcast Phil. " If you likes to go halves, I'll help you," offered Jim. Phil was only too pleased to accept the proposal, for it struck him he might learn a few of the tricks of the calling more easily from one of his own age. Directly Jim had fetched his broom, he went to work. His whole nature seemed to have altered in a moment. As soon as anybody set foot on the crossing, Jim was at them, grinning and looking up in the face as he ran before the passenger, sweeping away with savage industry, as if he took especial care in the person's boots. He moaned, and begged, and prayed, and rolled his big eyes about, too, in so extraordinary a style, that if they had been worked by clockwork, and made on purpose, they could not have shown more of the whites. Then sometimes he held out the dirty stuff bag he called a cap, and exposed to view a crop of hair that had matted itself into so many tufts, as if they were paint-brushes ; or else he ran on, pulling at his forelock, as if pecking at it with his hand, as a bird does at a hard crust. And all the time, too, that he was doing these things, he was whining out, half coaxingly, " Give poor little Jack a copper, your honour — a little copper for poor little Jack!" Phil watched his companion for a few moments, and then, imitating him as well as he could, he commenced the same kind of play. His success was astonishing. He was a pretty boy, and the ex- citement gave him a fresh colour, which had a wonderful effect upon the ladies. His being decently clothed was also rather in his favour, for one old lady even went so far as to say " he was a good boy to keep himself so decent, and make so good an appearance as he did." By the time Stumpy came back the boys had done excessively well. They sat down to share the proceeds. "I've taken fippunce," said Phil; "and here's your tuppunce- ha'penny. How much did you get ?" " Only tuppunce, on my oath," said Jim, coolly, though he knew very well that every farthing of the fourpence in his pocket had been earned on that very crossing. "I thought I saw you take more than that," said Phil; for it struck him that Mr. Jim's offering to "take his oath," even before he was accused, sounded very suspicious. " Search me, if you like," cried Mr. Jim, at the same time slipping the other twopence into a hole in his sleeve. "When Mr. Stumpy heard of the success of his protege, he felt a little envious, but was nevertheless highly pleased. " You and Jim had better stick together," suggested the old man ; " he is a pushing lad, and full of derwices. He know so many dodges, that if the Bank of England was to buy 'em at four a penny, it 'ud be smashed up before he sold 'em half." Phil and Jim walked away together. 90 PAVED WITH GOLD. "You want a broom, don't you?" asked Jim, cunningly. "I'll sell you mine for three 'arpence." It was a worn-out stump, only worth burning, but stupid Phil paid the money. " I say," said Jim, when they had walked a little further on, "I wish you'd lend me your waistcut. I'm so jolly cold, and you've got a coat." Simple Phil thought the request very reasonable, and granted it, but he never got the garment back again. When they had reached St. Martin's Church they sat down on the steps, and the new friend began to advise Phil as to what he would in future be expected to do. " I works in a gang," said Jim, " and we has all the crossings from here right up to Waterloo-place. Jack Drake — as we calls ' the Duck' — is our Captain, and we've made Teddy Plight, our king because he's the best tumbler of the lot of us. When I takes you on to the crossing, they'll try to pitch into you, but you mustn't mind that, and I'll stick up for you. Hit 'em hard. You don't mind being larrupped, do you ?" "Not that I know of," answered Phil, so readily that he gave Jim the impression that, on the contrary, he was rather partial to the amusement. / "And, I say, there's something else," added Jim. " What's that ?" asked Phil, trembling lest the' difficulty should be insurmountable, for he had set his heart upon crossing-sweeping. " You know you must give me third of all you takes, or I shan't have nothink to do with you," stipulated the blackguard little usurer. All preliminaries being agreed to, the couple moved forward to join the gang. It so happened that they were just then working the crossing between the Lowther-arcade and the passage by the side of St. Martin's churchyard. The moment Phil, carrying his broom, was seen by the young rogues, a shout was raised of " Here's afresh 'un ! here's a Greek !" and they all gathered round him, holding their handles as if they meant a fight. "Are you going to sweep here?" asked a very little fellow in a very pert tone. "All right, Teddy," put in Jim, "he's one of the right sort — a friend of mine." Teddy didn't seem to think it was all right, for he answered : " There's too many of us by a long sight, and it won't do ;" and as if to show that he meant what he said, he hit poor Phil over the head with his broom and ran oif. "All the boys called out, "Where's the Duck — where's Jack Drake?" A kind of fight had commenced when Jack made his appearance. A mob, too, had begun to collect, and a policeman was seen approach- ing in the distance. Under these circumstances, the first thing Mr. Drake did was to shout out, " What are you making a row for ?" the next was to order an adjournment to the " Jury House," by J^. h PAVED WITH GOLD. 91 which important name the steps of St. Martin's Church were dis- tinguished by the band. On the way to the Jury House, Jim whispered in the Captain's ear that the new comer was willing to pay his footing to the amount of twopence, a statement which seemed to please the Duck, for he smiled and winked. The King, as Master Teddy Plight was called by his companions, was a small-featured boy about as tall as a mantel-piece, and with a pair of grey eyes that were as bright and twinkling as chandelier- drops, and moved about suddenly and quickly as mice. He was clothed in a style of comparative magnificence befitting his title, having on a kind of dirt-coloured shooting-jacket of tweed, the edges of which were quickly fraying into a kind of cobweb trimming at the edges. His royal highness' s trousers were rather faulty, for at both the knees there was a pink wrinkled dot of flesh, and the length of the pants was too great for his majesty's short legs, so that they had been rolled up like a washerwoman's sleeves, making a thick roll about the feet, which, though wonderfully small, required a good deal of washing to render them attractive, and set-off their beauty of formation. In the course of that day Philip had many opportunities of witness- ing his majesty's wondrous tumbling powers. He would bend his little legs as round as the long German sausages in the ham-and-beef- shops, and when he turned head-over-heels, he curled up his tiny and ' august body as closely as a wood-louse, and then rolled along, wab- bling over like an egg. On the other hand, The Duck, or to give him his proper rank, Captain Jack Drake, was a big boy, with a face devoid of the slightest expression, until he laughed, when the cheeks, mouth, and forehead instantly became crumpled up with a wonderful quantity of lines and dimples. His hair was cut short, and stood up in all directions, like the bristles of a hearth-broom, and was of a light dust tint, matching with the hue of his complexion, which also, from neglecting to wash himself, had turned to a decided drab, or what house-painters term a stone colour. He had lost two of .his big front teeth, which caused his speech to be rather thick, though it enabled him to be an expert whistler, and which also allowed the tongue, as he talked, to appear through the opening, in a round nob like a raspberry. Captain Drake's regimentals were in a shocking condition ; he had no coat, and his blue-striped shirt was as dirty as a Prench polisher's rags, and so tattered that the shoulder w r as completely bare, and the sleeve hung down over the hand like a big bag. Of course he had no shoes on, and his black trousers, which were, with grease, gradually assuming a dull, leathery look, were fastened over one shoulder by means of a brace composed of bits of string. The solemn conclave at the Jury House ended in an uproar which required all the influence of the Duck to quell, and nearly ended in the King himself throwing up the broom of office, and resigning his throne. But Jim, by mortgaging Phil's future earnings to the amount of ninepence, at length succeeded in satisfying all parties. 92 PAVED WITH GOLD. The knowing Jim having already had some experience in Phil's success, took him with him to a crossing by themselves ; and he was right, too, for they both did so well that by nine o'clock they had made Is. 3d. each. They might have earned more, only it came on to rain, so Jim said he should knock off for the night. " "We in general goes up to the Haymarket, and tumbles and begs about there until two or three in the morning," said Jim, "but it would be no go to-night in the rain, so I shan't bother with it. I'll take you to-morrow instead." "Whilst going home, Jim showed Phil the shops where he usually bought his eatables. " I shall buy a pound of bread," said Jim, " because I've done pretty tidy, that's tuppence-farden — best seconds ; and a farden's worth of dripping — that's enough for a pound of bread — and a ha'porth of tea, and a ha'porth of brown sugar. We've got cups and saucers where we lodge." " Don't you ever eat meat ?" asked Phil, who was fond of it. " Yes, once or twice a week we get meat," answered Jim. " We club together and go into Newgate market and get some prime pieces cheap, and boils them at home. We tosses up who shall have the biggest bit, and we divide the broth, a cupful each, until it's lasted out." " I say, where shall I sleep ? I haven't got e'er a place," said Phil, whom these pleasing visions of Jim's home had roused to a sense of his destitution. "Haven't got a crib!" answered the crossing-sweeper. " You'd better come along with us. It's only thruppence anight, and there's a stunning nice flock-bed where four on us can sleep easy and com- fortable, and the covering is so warm it makes a cove steam in no time. Besides, it's betterer than a regular lodging-house, for if you want a knife or a cup, you don't have to leave nothink on it till it's returned." The two boys started off for Drury-lane, and entered one of the narrow streets which branch off from that long thoroughfare like the side-bones of a fish's spine. It was one of those streets which, were it not for the paved cart- way, would be called a court. On the night in question the drizzling rain had driven all the inmates in-doors ; but its appearance in the daytime, when the sun is shining, is very different. Then at each side of the entrance in Dury-lane is seated a costerwoman with her basket before her, and her legs tucked up mysteriously under her gown into a round ball. They both remain as inanimate as if they were a couple of carved trade-signs placed there to show that coster - mongers dwell in the street, and it is only when a passenger passes that they give any signs of life, by calling out in a low voice, like talking to themselves, " Two for three-harpence, herrens," and " Poine honneyens." This street is like the descriptions travellers have given of tho- roughfares in the East. Opposite neighbours cannot exactly shake hands out of the windows, but they can chat together very com- fortably ; and indeed, all day long, women are seen with their arms PAVED WITDZ GOLD. 93 folded up like cats' paws, leaning from the casements and conversing with their friends over the way. Nearly all the inhabitants are costermongers, and the narrow cart- way seems to have been made just wide enough for a truck to wheel down it. The owners of a beer-shop and a general store, with a couple of sweeps, whose residences are distinguished by a broom over the door, seem to form the only exceptions from the street-vendors who inhabit the court. On entering the place, it gives you the notion of belonging to a distinct colony, or as if it formed one large home, or private resi- dence ; for everybody seems to be doing just what he or she likes, and the way in which any stranger who passes is stared at, proves that he is considered in the light of an intruder. Women squat on the pavement, knitting and repairing their linen; the door- ways are blocked up with bonnetless girls who wear their shawls over their heads, as Spanish women do their mantillas ; and the coster youths, in their suits of corduroy, ornamented with brass buttons, are chatting with the maidens, and loll against the house walls as they smoke their pipes, blocking up the pavement with no more ado than if they were in a private garden. Little children find that the kerb- stone makes a convenient seat ; and parties of men seat themselves on the footway and play with cards which have been thumbed to the colour of brown paper, making the points they gain with chalk upon the flag-stones. The parlour windows which look into the street have all of them wooden shutters as thick and clumsy as the flaps to a kitchen table, and the paint is turned to the dull colour of a greased slate. Some of these shutters are evidently never used as a security for the dwell- ing, but only as a table upon which to chalk the accounts of the day's street-sale. Before some of the doors are costermongers' trucks — some standing ready to be wheeled oif, others just brought home, stained and muddy with the morning's work. A few costers are seen dressing up their barrows, arranging the sieves of waxy-looking potatoes ; others taking the stiff" herrings — browned like a meerschaum with the smoke they were dried in — from the barrels that look as clean as a captain's biscuit, and spacing the fish out in penn'orths on their trays. ' You can almost tell what each costermonger is out selling that day by the heap of refuse swept into the road before the door. At one place is a mound of blue mussel-shells — at another a pile of the outer leaves of brocoli and cabbages, turning yellow and slimy with bruises and moisture. Hanging up beside some of the doors are bundles of strawberry- pottles, stained red with the fruit, and their pointed ends sticking out in all directions, like the rays of a monster compass. Over the trap- doors to the cellars are piles of market-gardeners' sieve-baskets, all ruddled like a sheep's back with big red and blue letters. In fact, everything that meets the eye seems to be in some way connected with the coster's trade. From the upper windows poles stretch out across the court, on which blankets, petticoats, and linen are drying; and so numerous 94i PAYED WITH GOLD. are these poles that they remind one of the flags hung out at a Paris fete. Many of the sheets have patches as big as trap-doors let into their centres, and the blankets are — some of them — as full of holes as a pigeon-house. " Bows" are very frequent in such a court. The first day Phil passed at his new residence he had the opportunity of witnessing one. He couldn't tell how it began. All he saw was a lady, whose hair wanted brushing, leaning out of a first-floor window, and haranguing a crowd beneath, throwing her arms about her as if she was struggling in the water, and in her excitement nearly pitching her body half-way out of her temporary rostrum, with the same energy as that with which Punch is made to jerk himself over his theatre. "He dragged her," she shouted, "by the hair of her head for at least ten yards into the court — the villun ! and then he kicked her, and I see the blood on his boot ! Oh, you murdering hound, you ! you villun !" She shook her fist at a sweep — as black as a fly — who had been behaving in this cowardly way to some poor creature. Still the man had his defenders in the women around him. One with very shiny hair, and an Indian handkerchief round her neck, answered the lady in the window, calling her "a d — d old cat," whilst the sweep's wife rushed about, clapping her hands together as quickly as if she were applaud- ing at a theatre, and calling somebody "an old vagabond as she wouldn't dirty her hands to fight." This row had the effect of drawing all the dwellers in the court to their windows, many of whom inquired, " "What's up with old Parkers ?" Their heads popped out as suddenly as dogs from their kennels in a fancier's yard. When the two lads reached the door of the house where the gang lived, Jim stopped suddenly to say to Phil, " Don't mind what old Mother O'Donovan says to you. We calls her Mother Doo-nuffin. She's not a bad sort, when she isn't drunk. And, I say, don't pay her if she's lushy, 'cos she's sure to forget all about it in the morning, and want you to pay again." With this admonition, Phil stumbled after his companion up some stairs, which, in the dark, seemed to him to be all wedge-shaped, and to be continually twisting round. At last Jim stopped and opened a door. As he entered the room he cried out, " Mother, I'm always doing you a good turn. Here, I've brought you a new lodger." " If he's got threepence he's intirely welcome," answered a shaky voice from inside. So Phil, having that sum, stepped boldly forward and presented himself to his landlady. She was dressed in a linen jacket, which joined on to a short petticoat, and as her naked feet and a considerable portion of the legs were visible, she had something the appearance of a bathing- woman. She wore a frilled nightcap, which, from her having no hair, fitted her head as tight as a bladder. "You're a nice-looking boy enough," she said, eyeing Phil; "I hope you'll behave yourself and pay your rent regular, and not follow the example of ' The Duck,' who niver has a penny in his dirtie pocket." PAVED WITH GOLD. 95 If she was pleased with Phil's looks, he was rather startled by hers, for one of her eyes was slowly recovering from a blow, and her lip, too, was cut and swollen. "Is it my oieye you're looking at, child?" she said, noticing his surprise. " It was a dirtie blackgeyrd gave it me, and turned it as blue as a mussel." The room was scarcely larger than a larder, and the ceiling was so low that a fly paper, suspended from a clothes-line, was on a level with the head, and had to be carefully avoided when moving about. One corner was completely filled up with a big four-post bedstead, which fitted into a kind of recess as perfectly as if it had been built to order. There were two forms lying asleep in this bed, and by a round, fair arm, put out to pull up the coverlid, they were evidently women. The old landlady had endeavoured to give the dwelling a homely look of comfort by hanging about the walls little black-framed pictures, scarcely bigger than pocket-books. Most of them were sacred subjects, principally of saints, with large yellow glories round their heads as big as straw hats ; though between the drawings of two Apostles, undergoing their martyrdom, was an illustration of a red-waistcoated " Jolly Sailor," smoking his pipe, and the Adoration of the Shepherds, ingeniously coloured in red, blue, and yellow, was matched on the other side of the fireplace by a portrait of Daniel O'Connell in a gorgeous cloak. The chest of drawers was covered over with a green-baize cloth, on which books, shells, and clean glasses were tidily set out. The first thing Jim did on entering was to wash his muddy feet. "Whilst he was doing this, Phil whispered to him, " "We don't all sleep in that bed, do we ?" " Of course not," answered Jim, " our place is in the next room, a fust-rate turn-out !" They had scarcely been home ten minutes before another of the boys made his appearance. It was one that Phil had never seen before. Mike w as a short, stout-set youth, with a face like an old man's, forthe feafures were hard and defined, and the hollows had got filled up with dirt, like a wood carving. This youth wore a man's coat, which made him look all body, for the waist reached to his knees. His hair, too, was very peculiar, for it spread out from the crown like a tuft of grass where a rabbit has been squatting. The boy's countenance was so dirty that Mother Doo-nuffin roared out in horror when she saw him. The rain had beat in his face, and he had rubbed it with his muddy hands until it was marbled like a copybook cover, with circles, streaks, and dots. " You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Mike — and that's Gospel truth — not to go and sluice the muck off yourself. Instead of wash- ing, like a Christian, you've been larking with them girls over the way." A voice under the bed-clothes cried out, " Yes, I seed him along with them, going on with their pranks." Mike laughed feebly, and replied, " I can't get this here off with- out a drop of hot water." But the old lady indignantly silenced him, 96 PAVED WITH GOLD. by screaming out, "And haven't you had time to heat gallins by this time ?" About eleven o'clock the remainder of the gang returned home, wet through, and tired out. The moment the old woman saw the Duck she began to attack him. " Where's the rent you owe me, Mr. Drake ? I know you've got money, so cash up." "Ah, you are hard upon a chap," pleaded the Duck. "It's the candid truth I'm telling, when I say, I can't tell you the last shilling I handled." "For shame on yer, Drake — for shame on yer!" cried the land- lady ; " now didn't you make six shilling last week — now, spake Bible truth— didn't you ?" " What ! six shillings !" cried the Duck, " six shillings ! — it would make a bright youth of me." And he looked up to the ceiling, and shook his hands. " Why, I never heard of such a sum. I did once see half-a-crown ; but I don't know as I ever touched one." " xhin," roared the old lady, " it's because you're idle, Drake, and don't study when you're on the crossing, but lits the people go by without ever a word. That's what it is !" The Duck, who made more money than any one else in the gang, pretended to feel the truth of the reproach, and said, with a sigh, " I knows I am fickle-minded." " Look at Teddy Flight," continued the dame, " he's not aquarther your size, Drake, and yet he brings home his eighteenpence reg'lar. I blush for yer, Drake ; you're disgracing the world by living in it and never paying a penny of the rint all the time." To escape being scolded, the Duck retired to rest and was speedily followed by the others. The bedroom was merely an empty apartment, with a big mattress on the floor. They remained talking for some time before they went to sleep, and the conversation — for the sake of Phil — turned upon the science of throwing cart-wheels or eaten- wheeling as they termed it, coupled with the art of turning head over heels. " I was the first as ever did caten-wheeling on a crossing," said the Duck, proudly, " and I learnt the others to do it. That's why I was made Capten, because I was the best tumbler." " Ah, Teddy Flight is the one to tumble, though !" cried Jim, " go along the streets like any think, he can ! Ah, to see him and the Duck have a race, it is just beautiful ! Away they goes, but Teddy leaves him a mile behind in less than no time." The Duck said humbly, " I called Teddy the King of Tumblers — the King, and I'm Capten — yet I learned him. Ah ! I'd give all my health and strength to that little feller if I could, I'm that proud of him." " Does it hurt, tumbling ?" asked Phil. Mike, who was taking lessons in the art, broke in, " Hurt ! I be- lieve you. It makes the blood come to the head and sets all the things about a turning. And don't it tire you too, that's all. Only try it." Phil had alr§ady made up his mind to do so. PAVED WITH GOLD. 97 CHAPTEE IV. ON THE CROSSING. Philip Merton is a crossing-sweeper — a most accomplished and successful crossing-sweeper. He has ended his apprenticeship, and thoroughly learned his busi- ness, He no longer pays black mail to the usurious Jim, nor lends halfpence, that are never to be returned, to Captain Drake ; neither does he trouble himself about discharging the taxes so whimsically imposed by that most free-and-easy monarch, King Teddy Plight the First. If he chose, he could depose that upstart sovereign, or cause the gallant Duck to be degraded to the ranks; for Phil has such " luck on the crossing," that the half-dozen little rips who compose fhis muddy band are envious of his success, and treat him with the greatest respect. Phil has only to raise the broom of rebellion, and the dynasty of the Flights would be puffed out as easily as a rush- light in a gale of wind. And here it may, perhaps, be as well to remark that the great com- mercial principle of superior wealth has the same influence over little dirt-stained crossing-sweepers as over great and glorious City gentle- men. The day Phil cleared four shillings, he was complimented and carnied by his ragged companions as thoroughly as was Mr. Stearine, of the firm of Margerine and Co., when he appeared on 'Change, after realising a cool thirty thousand by the rise in tallow. In the arts of throwing " cart-wheels " and turning head over heels, Phil has become so efficient that even the Duck himself stands en- tranced and fascinated when watching his graceful tumbling. The compliments paid by the Duck are quaintly vulgar, but unmistakably sincere. " The first time I see him," remarks the ragged Captain, " I could see he were all there, and a rare bit of stuff." "With his limbs outspread like opened scissors, Phil trundles along the pavement, looking one mass of revolving legs ; so that, had a Manx man happened to pass, he might have fancied the arms of his native island had wandered from their escutcheon and come to London, where necessity had compelled them to sell their casings of steel and put up with tattered corduroy. Even that acknowledged bounding favourite, King Flight, whose acrobatic feats had sent him head over heels on to the throne, dares not contest with Phil for gymnastic superiority ; and the great match made some fortnight since, " to eaten- wheel" along the north side of Trafalgar-square for a wager of threepence, has not yet come off, nor is it ever likely to be decided, for his royal highness is very doubtful of the result. But Phil has learned to do other things besides tumbling and begging. He has won the admiration of this band of lawless mud- sweepers by the fulness and fire of his big oaths. If he had worn a beard a foot long, or if he had been a drill-sergeant, or the stage u 98 PAYED WITH GOLD. manager of a theatre, he could not have sworn rounder curses than came from his boyish pouting lips. When he is angry he will roar out his blistering oaths, jumbling them up together in senseless con- fusion, for he has picked up the silly words without understanding their meaning, and he throws them at his antagonists in the same way as he would stones. In his quiet, pleasant, friendly converse, he garnished his remarks with swearing, spacing out his words with fiery exclamations, and rougeing up his sentences with powerful adjectives ; but he does so, stupid lad, more because it makes his companions laugh than from what he knows of their purport or the use they may be to the phrase. "When any oath stronger than usual is made use of, Mike, who is a great admirer of Phil, has been heard to remark, " He do like a bit of scarlet ;" and Jim has more than once observed, that " Tou might a'most see to go to bed by Phil's swear- ing, it's so blazing powerful." To hear these terrible words rise fuming from a child's dimpled mouth, causes many well-disposed persons, as they pass along, to draw in their breath with horror, for they experience the same shock as if they had seen a babe playing with a sharp knife. Should any kind enthusiast be bold enough to stop and counsel the silly boy, he soon discovers how useless his admonitions are, for oath after oath de- tonates in his face as if the lad were defending himself with a revolver loaded with blasphemy, and all the gang, like so many village curs, come yelping around the poor moralist, barking out their volleys of curses until he is driven away. The poor child, too, has acquired a dexterous knack of petty pilfer- ing. To show his skill at purloining, he snatches up cabbages from outside greengrocers' shops and throws them away again when he is out of sight. The old man who sells sheep' s-trotters outside the public- house in the Hay market fears Phil more than a policeman, for when- ever the young rip passes, either the mustard spoon is whipped up, and all covered as it is with the yellow condiment, rammed down the vendor's neck, or else the bottom of the basket receives a vigorous tap, which sends the dust-coloured articles of food jumping into the air like parched peas on a drum. "When a dairy girl goes past, swinging her body to and fro with the weight of her milk-pails, Phil lifts up the lids of the cans and drops stones inside, which splash down into the white liquid, and then rattle about inside the tin vessel with a noise like theatrical thunder. He chalks the backs of highly-dressed gentlemen ; he stuffs orange-peel into the hoods of ladies' cloaks, and he pricks the quivering calves of fashionable foot- men. At the general dealer's where the boys buy their bread and dripping, nothing is safe from Phil's quick fingers. A slice of bacon is hidden in the sleeve with the same dexterity as a conjuror passes a card, and though the general dealer herself keeps her eye upon him, he manages to rob like a clown in a pantomime, and apparently for the same result, for all the pilfered onions, potatoes, and herrings are afterwards flung about as in the " pelting " scene on the stage. Many a time has an apple woman, whilst dozing on the kerb-stone, been startled out of her life by the cries of " Hi ! hi !" the scamp has — as PAVED WITH GOLD. 99 if a cab were close behind her — shouted in her ear, in order that he might, during her flutter, purloin the penny pyramids of fruit. The innocent look that once gave interest to Phil's face, and made wayfarers generous through pity, has now changed to an impudent, roguish air, which from its archness amuses sufficiently to be profit- able. He can twist his flexible features in twenty expressions in less than a minute ; at one time appearing exhausted and suffering, then stretching his lips into a smile as readily as a circus rider, or assum- ing a sly raven's glance as he peeps up sideways into a lady's bonnet. The monkey manners and buffoon tricks he has picked up give a gloss to his begging, so that when the people look into his pretty face and see it bright and restless as a jack-a-dandy, they are forced to laugh, and then Phil knows he is sure to get a penny. Poor little runaway boy ! the dangerous hour of his life is at hand. Already he has thrown off the bashfulness of childhood, and nothing is left but its weakness and folly. He has overcome that timidity which was the careful nurse to his helplessness, and drew him back from evil. Now the silly babe ventures into the world and engages in its conflicts, knowing as little of its dangers as the infant that holds out its dimpled hands to the bars of a lion's cage. How can his weak mind, that blank whose future depended upon what was written there, give him strength to avoid the temptations that smite down strong men, even when fortified by the sense of right and wrong. The care that watched over his infant days and laboured to fit him for the struggles of existence has been upset by the experience of a month. He had toiled up the hill of life ; his body had become strengthened to the journey ; he was beginning to have a wider view of the world and its objects, when suddenly he has wavered in his - course, and the good of years has rolled swiftly down the slope into the dirty ditch below. The silly boy looks upon his present life as a holiday ; he laughs at the time when he had masters over him, and grows extravagant and uproarious with his freedom. Already has he become habituated to the courses of his companions, and in endeavouring to imitate he sur- passes them. There is but one who could save Phil from the destiny that seems to await him. Could Sister Bertie meet with him, could he but hear her coaxing voice, he would run rejoicingly to her as a dog that has strayed bounds to the call of its master, for he bears her an earnest love which would make her reproaches sting him like whips, and force him to obey her good counsels. Sister Bertie is his conscience. She is the only one he dreads to meet as he stands in his rags on the crossing. He thinks of her by day and night, she fills his bosom like his breath. ' When he is tossing on his flock-bed, awake though his eyes are closed, it is Bertie that will not let him sleep, for she is at his ear, whisper- ing recollections of the peaceful days -gone by, and bringing back memories that make him feel faint as they pass through his brain. " Mother often wonders where you are," whispers conscience Bertie ; and the boy's temples grow hot, and he lies so still that he feels his heart beat with a dull weight that shakes all his body. h 2 100 PAVED WITH GOLD. In the darkness of the night when he shuts his eyes, Phil can, by thinking intently, call up the image of any person that he resolutely fixes his thoughts upon, and many a time has he summoned to him the form of that tender-hearted woman, Nurse Hazlewood ; and then she stands before him, vivid as the image on a stained-glass window, with her eyes downcast, as he has so often seen them when gazing up in her face. Then Phil can scarcely draw in his breath, and, choking with fear, he tosses about, and tries to drive the shadowy form away. As if he dreaded that those phantom lips might reproach him, he sobs a out excuses to his " dear mother," and pleads so earnestly for pardon, that sometimes his companions are awakened, and fancying he has been dreaming, shake him violently. These regrets and sorrows are the emotions that humanise the boy, and help to 'preserve 'Klin from total ruin of soul. "Whilst his fellows are laughing at his impotent oaths, or, in their rough manner, praising his last larceny, Sister Bertie has her hand on his heart, tightening it with remorse, or he feels a chill pass over his forehead, as if " mother" had breathed upon him ; and then he answers the flattery with a forced laugh, that does not rise from the chest with a joyous ring in it, but is dead and toneless as a moan. The laws by which the little community of associated crossing- sweepers was governed were of so simple a nature, that, after study- ing them for a matter of twenty minutes, Phil was sufficiently versed in jurisprudence to commence his muddy profession without fear of offending any member of the body. \ There was a rough notion of honour preserved among these lads which condemned any attempt at cheating among themselves, although, as a kind of compensation for this privation, it was enacted that every other member of the human family should be considered as a fair object of plunder, whom it was perfectly right to cheat, defraud, trick, or otherwise impose upoih\ The only system of punishment enforced under this muddy code wa^ of a summary nature, somewhat resembling in speediness of execu- tion the celebrated Lynch law, although no instance has yet been recorded of death having followed its infliction, the culprit being usually permitted to escape when the torture measured out to him .bad reached to "within an inch of his life." According to an act which was made and passed in the second year of the reign of his majesty King Teddy Might, it was enacted that, any boy attempting " to^crab," i. e. cheat, another, should then and there, and without warning, "have a broom broke about him," or, indeed, receive such other bodily injury as any member of the little com- munity might feel inclined to inflict, such as kicking, hitting, or pull- ing of hair. By another clause . of this same act it was further ordained, in order to put an end to the constant quarrels which arose during business hours as to the rightful owner of the halfpence given by the foot-passengers, that a system of " naming" should be adopted, by which the boy who was the first to call out that he saw any- body coming, should lawfully and of his own right be entitled to take, receive, pocket, and apply to his own use, any money or moneys PAVED WITH GOLD. 101 that might be handed, thrown, or otherwise given by the wayfarers aforesaid. In order to conceal their language as much as possible from their arch-enemy the policeman, a kind of slang was adopted by the sweeping crew, which was supposed to render their proceedings mysterious and unintelligible to any but themselves. Por this pur- pose the rather degrading appellation of " toff" was given to all persons of the male gender, whilst the insulting epithet of " doll" was applied to every aged female, the younger members of the gentler sex being known by the peculiar title of " doxy." If, while they were begging, a policeman was seen to approach the crossing, the signal of " tow-row" "Was instantly given, so that the gang might have time to take to their dirty little heels and escape from the Berlin-gloved grasp of the law,' which they all wdll knew highly disapproved of alms-seeking in the streets. As a better precau- tion against any sudden surprise from the constables stationed near their haunts, each " active officer" of Scotland-yard had a nickname given to him, which was generally of an insulting character. There was " Old Bandy," a highly intelligent member of the force, so called from the peculiar construction of his legs, which allowed an opening shaped somewhat like a. horse-collar to be seen between his limbs. Another was called "Black Diamond," from his having singularly brilliant eyes, which shone out from his pale, cream-laid countenance like blots. A third was known as " Bull's Head," owing to the apoplectic appearance of his neck, and the tight, crisp curls which covered his forehead. Besides these there were Messrs. " Cherry- legs" and "Dot-and-carry-One," and " Shivery-shanks," all of whom had earned their sobriquets by their offensive vigilance and strict supervision of this more or less honourable Company of Crossing- sweepers. A system of compulsory fines had, shortly before Phil's introduc- tion to the society, been instituted by the Captain, who, being the first to put it in force, had styled the measure " smugging," and its operation was something like the following : w^e will suppose that Mr. Mike has dishonourably endeavoured to appropriate to himself Mr. Jem's " naming" of some approaching foot-passenger ; for this want of courtesy the injured Mike would be justified in " smugging" the offender's broom, or — if he wore one — his cap, and he would even be held harmless should the confiscated property be thrown dow : n the nearest area or into the most convenient water-butt. AVhile explaining to Phil the working of this law, King Plight, to impress it thoroughly on the novice's mind, made use of these remarkable words : " I'm the littlest chap among our lot, but if a feller as big as the Duck was to behave unhandsome, I'd smug something, and get his ha'pence, even if he smashed me like a winder." This sentiment pleasingly illustrates the strong determination ever felt by his ragged majesty to see 'the laws of his dynasty properly respected and carried out. Owing to the late hours the gang were in the habit of keeping — through their business engagements in the Haymarket, where they were usually professionally employed until three in the morning — 102 PAYED WITH GOLD. the boys seldom made their appearance upon their crossings before mid-day. " I never stops out all night," said one of the band, a promising youth of eleven, to Phil, who was inquiring into their habits ; " it kills me for the next day. The Duck is dreadful for late hours — he likes it ; but I can't manage nohow without my rest, for I bees so sleepy that I ain't fit to handle a broom." When Phil had become accustomed to his new life, he entered into all the peculiarities of it as earnestly and noisily as the oldest hand in the troop. If the weather was dry and the roads dusty, he gene- rally preferred " tumbling" and " caten-wheeling" along the passage by St. Martin's Church. Three or four of the young gentlemen would take up their stand at the end near the Lowther Arcade, and with their eyes intently fixed upon the bazaar-like thoroughfare, await the approach of any " likely-looking" persons. Presently an old lady and her child are seen advancing. " A doll and a kiddy !" shout two of the lads in one voice ; and immediately afterwards — to prevent disputes from their having "named" them simultaneously — one of them adds, " Go you halves," and the terms being accepted, they both commence twirling and twisting like imps in a pantomime round the dame and her progeny, who, startled at finding the muddy feet dart past her eyes rapidly as the sails of a windmill, draws back in horror and disgust. " Shy us a copper, mum," pleads one. "Poor little Jack, miss," whines another; and then they both writhe and pull their hair supplicatingly to the unprotected couple. "A toff and a doxy," roars Phil, in his turn, as a fashionably-attired youth, in earnest flirtation with an elegant damsel resting on his arm, nears the "school." Eut Phil has not noticed the little child that, laden with toys, is trotting by the maiden's side, and the sharp-eyed Jem shouts out — quick as the report of a pistol — " And a kiddy," and so claims the " call," for it had been wisely enacted by King Plight that accuracy in these matters is the sole method of business. The lovers are checked in their sweet converse by the supple Jem placing his broom behind him and assuming a " honey-pot" position, in which attitude he rolls before them wabbling like a nine-gallon cask, and at the same time imploring, in a voice rendered thick by his head being held down, that the " Captain will give poor Jacky a little sixpence." Phil, by constant practising on the flock-bed in the sleeping apart- ment of his lodgings, has arrived at that state of gymnastic perfection that he can turn over head and heels about thirty times consecutively. This talent has procured him a great deal of custom, even among his companions, for, should one of them, who is unable to " tumble," make a " call," he will depute Phil to perform for him, and share the proceeds — if any. With gentlemen of sporting dispositions Phil is invariably appointed to provide the acrobatic entertainment. As soon as anybody wearing the natty tight trousers and flat-brimmed hat peculiar to frequenters of betting-rooms is seen lounging afar off, the boys know that nobody can coax so many halfpence from him PAYED WITH GOLD. 103 as Master Phil, and lie is always requested to give his performance. On such occasions the lad generally styles himself " The little winner of the Derby." After he has wabbled over some ten times, he stops to see if the " sporting toff" is laughing, and even the faintest smile is sufficient to send him trundling on again like a hat before the wind. It is not an unfrequent occurrence for the sport-loving gent to give the young monkey that peculiar allowance known as " more kicks than halfpence," for he has been known to run at the curled-up boy, and saying " Get out of that," administer a vigorous thrust with his boot, which has sent Phil rolling like a football. During their meal hours, which were by no means regular, the boys would talk in a professional manner of the day's exploits. If the earnings had been small, the conversation usually took a melan- choly turn. " They're a-gettin' pretty nigh sick of caten-wheeling," said the King, sorrowfully, as, seated on a door-step, he munched his bread and dripping. " It's enough to make a chap's 'art turn sour, it is," he went on, his cheeks puffed out with the last mouthful until they were as tight and round as a horn-player's. Another of the Associated Sweepers, who was known by the nick- name of the " Stuttering Baboon," spluttered out — "And 'ead and 'eels ain't 'arf a living for a feller, for if you only does it four or five goes, they says * Oh, hany body could do that there,' and they won't give nuffen." " Dear, dear !" sighed the Duck, "money is tight ; it's like pulling a tooth out getting ha'pence now. People's feelings has reg'lar froze up to what they was." "Ah!" chimed in Jem, " we works hard for what we gets; no- body more so. And then there's the perlice always a-birching us so spiteful." Phil, too, would add his groan to the rest. " And such crammers as I've heard people tell. One old chap says, ' I hasn't any coppers,' when I could hear him a-playing with 'em in his pocket, a-rattling on 'em like a tambourine." If, on the other hand, the morning's receipts had been equal to their expectations, the gang would laugh and make as much noise over their twopenny entertainment as if they w r ere so many gentle- men at a Blackwall dinner. "Did you see how I forced that chap in the shooting-jacket p" boasts Jem on such occasions. "Says he, 'I ain't got no ha'pence,' and, says I, ' I ain't perticular if its silver ;' and he laughed, and chucked me a fourpenny." The " Duck," too, is in excellent spirits, and, contrary to his usual habit, admits that he has done "pretty well." Referring to one exploit, he says, " She gave me threepence ;" and a sweet smile burst over his grimy face ; " and it were done up in paper, like a young gal's curl on a Sunday morning." At this point King Plight joins in joyously, " I seed a feller a-courting a gal, and he gave me a 'hole handful of coppers just to show off he were tender-hearted afore her." " The most I got," chirps Phil, " was by following a 'oman with a baby, and, says I, keeping close to the young un, ' Spare a trifle, kind 104 PAVED WITH GOLD. lady, for there's five on us at home, and all took awful with the small-pox ;' and says she, ' Keep off !' And she scrunches up the child into a lump, and so I got sixpence." "When the ground was muddy, so that a number of persons were forced to make use of Phil's crossing, his pocket would fill rapidly with halfpence. On one such day — it had been raining " beautifully" all night, and the roads were dirty as the path round a piggery — he had as much as a crown given to him, " and all in coppers, without one bit of silver among it." As soon as he had collected a shilling, the little fellow would run off to the general dealer's and deposit it with " old Mother Savings-bank," as they nicknamed the woman. This prudent step was taken through fear of getting into trouble with the police from begging ; for all in this sweeping community well knew that, if when taken into custody money was found on them, not only would the magistrate punish them severely for asking charity when they were not in positive want, but, worse than all, the little fortune tied up in a rag and stowed away in pockets and corners of linings was forfeited and taken from them for that most terrible of all fates — to be spent by somebody else. Whilst Phil was, one day, having this terrible point of the law explained to him by Captain Duck, he could not refrain from asking, " And who gets the money they collars from the chaps ?" The gallant Mr. Drake, whose opinion of the uprightness of a police magistrate was but a poor one, replied with a wink, " Ah ! that's the game ! He makes out the Crown have it ; but if the Crown don't get more than he lets slip through his fingers, why the Crown must be wery hard up, I should say." Young Phil held a share, as joint proprietor, in three crossings ; for although the ground from the Lowther Arcade down to the Haymarket belonged nominally to the entire gang, yet, to avoid dis- putes and ruinous opposition during business hours, they had divided the different roads among them. Of a morning before starting for the day's labours, they would talk of their crossings as noblemen do of their estates. " I think I shall take a run down to Charing- cross," Jem would say, " I ain't been there ever such a time ; it's one of the best stands I has." " What'll you sell us your crossing for ?" would ask the speculative Duck, who was fond of " dabbling" in muddy ventures. " Owe you a bob and a broom for it." " I likes opposite to the Arcade best," Phil would observe, "it's as good a bit o' ground as any in London for bringing in money." There was a crossing near Spring Gardens, in which Phil also had an interest, though he used to underlet it to a little girl, who at night would give him part of her earnings. This property was known among the gang as Grub-street, it being chiefly valuable for the " broken victuals" it brought in ; for the servants in the neighbour- hood would employ the young scavengers to run errands for them, and in return give them " the bits" that came from the table of Dives, their master. Teddy Plight used often to moan over the slight revenue that this property returned him. " It ain't sixpence a week to a chap," he would lament, " for all the gentlemens as lives there PAVED WITH GOLD. 105 has such a lot of carriages — that catch 'em a walking that's all." Sometimes the food — or scran as they called it — given to the urchins consisted of the plate- scrapings, collected from yesterday's dinner- party, and included many scraps of the " greatest delicacies of the season." On such occasions the feast was usually held on the stone steps leading to St. James's Park. As soon as the cap which did duty as dish, was emptied of its contents and the banquet exposed to view, an equal partition of the dainty viands took place, though not without a good deal of quarrelling among the alfresco party. The "Duck" seeing a morsel of "mayonnaise de volaille," would instantly implore that the "chicken with the shaving soap" might fall to his lot. On such occasions, bits of jelly were termed " size," and " fricandeau de veau" was familiarly spoken of as " hedgehog." Bargains, too, would be made after the following fashion : " Grive us some of your smashed taters for these here fish 'eads;" or, "I'll give you that there big bit of fat for some of your cold carrots." The criticisms on the cooking, too, were peculiar and original ; curry being declared to " beat peppermint at warming a chap," and pieces of almond-flavoured custard considered to be a kind of per- fumery manufactured on the same principle as scented hair-oil. "When evening came on the boys left their crossings and made for the Haymarket, which they looked upon as the great hunting-ground for "coppers," and so much more profitable did they find their nocturnal exploits, that, even when they had taken nothing during the day, they seldom felb depressed if the night turned out to be fine, for then they were certain that there would be plenty of people " out on the loose," and pennies as plentiful as buttons. Neither were the boys so much afraid of the constables when they could carry on their tricks by gas-light. The dark shades of night, assisted by the invisible dirt-colour of the lads' garments, protected them so thoroughly, that no member of the police force troubled himself to pursue them, for he knew how hopeless the chase would be. The nimble young rogues could fly away from the stout-limbed guardian of peace as easily as sparrows from a lap-dog. Besides, if ever a hunt icere attempted, the bare-footed urchins had their " har- bours of refuge" and " strong places." They would dart across the road, dodging safely among the cabs which were hurrying to and fro — driven so recklessly that, had the officer attempted to follow, he would assuredly have been minced among the wheels — and when once the band had reached the stone balustrade round Trafalgar- square, they soon dropped the deep w r all and were safe below, where they usually re- mained for a time talking pleasantly to the constable, who, not daring to follow them, rested his elbows on the parapet, and looked down upon the grinning culprits, and harangued them threateningly on their bad conduct. The boys firmly believed that the policeman was not yet born who would have courage to jump that high wall. They referred with delight to the great victory they had once gained over a " red lioner" — as the officers of the Mendicity Society were termed. The rash but intrepid constable, in endeavouring to jump that very balustrade, had so seriously injured his trousers that they were " split to ribbins," and from that day, warned by his example, none who had any regard for appearances had ever repeated the expensive experiment. 106 PAVED WITH GOLD. CHAPTER V. NIGHT ON TO.WN. When all London is at rest — when bedroom blinds are drawn down and street doors locked and chained — when lights are rarely seen but in the windows of the sick wards of hospitals, which seem the only places where any are awake — then the Haymarket is in its glory, gay and lively as a ball-room, with the gaudily-dressed multi- tude sauntering along its broad pavements, crowding them as on an illumination night. The gas is flaring from the shop windows, and throwing out its brilliant rays until the entire street is lit up as a The dissolute and the idle are pouring down to this great play- ground of folly, like moths attracted by the glare that must sooner or later destroy them. On they come, some in silks and satins, dressed out for the fete, and others with the money in their pockets that is to pay for the banqueting and revelry. The cabs that rattle down Regent-street have all been told to stop at the corner of the Hay- market. Men that have taken their fill of wine at the dinner-table have come thither to finish up the night, and drink on, without thirst, liquor that but a few hours since they w r ould have sickened at; youths, yet surfeited with their last meal, enter as a matter of course into supper-rooms, and without feeling the least hunger, still eat, for the viands they would have refused at home are here flavoured and rendered palatable by debauchery, and the next day they can boast about their doings. Officers with heavy moustaches have come up from the garrison towns, travelling many a mile on purpose to enjoy this one night on town. Bearded foreigners, who have heard of these midnight revels, are strolling about, smoking their white cigarettes and gesticulating violently as they criticise the vice of England and denounce the scene they have nevertheless determined on visiting every night during their stay in the metropolis. Husbands are there too, who when they reach home will pass off their insobriety as exhaus- tion, as they tell their wives how business detained them at chambers ; and brothers loiter about, caring little for the hour, though sisters are waiting up for them to open the street door silently, so that the strict father, sleeping above, may know nothing of their son's excesses. Groups of men and women block up the pavement, laughing and joking roughly together ; every corner has its little assembly of gossips, who presently go off in couples to the nearest oyster-shop or public-house. This same Haymarket is the great republic of vice, where all who enter are hail fellow well met, for every one knows why the other has come there, and virtue being cast off for the time, all rank and station cease. Outside the tavern doors are gathered clusters of " gentlemen PAYED WITH GOLD. 107 of the laud" talking to the poor souls who, disguised by some " magasin de modes," have hidden the servant-maid under the toilette of the lady. The " heir to a title" stands bowing to some pretty-faced girl, who mixes up her bad grammar with oaths. The public-house door swings back to let pass the " hope of a family," who is about to sip gin at the counter with the chip bonnet at his side. Seated at a supper-table is a pink-faced boy, fresh from his country home, helping with delicate attention the rouged-up form beside him. She laughs noisily as a man, flinging her arms about, and as the champagne foams in her glass she tosses her head like a Bacchanal. But what by day- light would disgust, seems charming in the blaze of the Haymarket gas, and the lad looks with admiration upon the companion whom on the morrow he would pass without even a nod of recognition. Every street in the vicinity of this Haymarket partakes more or less of its debauched character. In some there are mysterious, closed-up houses, into the back parlours of which none may enter but the initiated, there to empty tumblers of such drink that in a wiser hour they would push from them as unfit even to allay the pain of thirst. Seated on soft-cushioned sofas that are as yielding as they — poor simpletons — have been, are women decked out like shop-windows, clothed in the rich gloom of velvet or the brilliance of satin, with costly laces — richly worked as a Gothic tracery, such as few virtuous women could afford — filagreeing about their arms and necks. But how little of the woman do these foolish maidens retain beyond the clothes they wear ! They are bolder and wilder than the men who have come there to court them ; they answer gentle speeches with the slang of a cab-driver, and even in their merriment they jerk out oaths with their laughter. And this is called seeing life ! — yes, it may be so, but it is such life as that which exists in the drop of putrid water — the life of the ditch and sewer. They say there is no rest for the wicked, and certainly there is none for the Haymarket ; it is the owl of Loudon, that wakes up at dusk lively and fresh for the night, and hoots and screeches till morning comes again. Those who dwell and trade in this thoroughfare have pale faces, countenances blanched from the lack of sunlight, that iu the day look used and " seedy" as a 'masquerade dress, but at night are fevered up into seeming health when the warmth of the gas strikes upon the cheek. They sleep away the morn with closed shutters and drawn curtains, and the healthful breezes of the sun- warmed day never blow against their sickly skin. They seek for health from the doctor and for cheerfulness from the wine-bottle ; and when, after a few years, they have heaped together the round sums they so longed for, the body that was to have enjoyed them is withered and rotten, and they envy the hunger of the beggar and the strength of the ploughman. Each member of the associated beggar-boys was" as well versed in the Haymarket as the district postman himself, and knew the different shops and the names of the proprietors as thoroughly as if he bad learnt them off from the " London Directory." The lads had also studied with much attention "Waterloo-place, and had even managed 108 PAYED WITH GOLD. to pick up an acquaintance with some of the gentlemen who lounged about there smoking their cigars. The magnificent pavement of this latter thoroughfare, and its half desertion, afforded the " school" many excellent opportunities for tumbling, an exercise which was utterly impossible in the crowded Haymarket, from the fact of most persons objecting to have either their face slapped by the cold muddy foot of the young eaten- wheeler, or to be tripped up by the rolling human bundle coming head over heels against their unsuspecting legs. " It's not a bit o' good a-getting to the Haymarket afore nine," the Duck would say. " There's only the swells a-going to the Opera, and they're too clean to laugh. Just wait till they've crumpled their waistkits a bit, and then they unbends theirselves more to a chap." The Haymarket, considered as a street, may be said to have two natures : one moral, and the other immoral ; for on one side of the roadway the shops give every indication of being virtuous and well- behaved dwellings, for they work at their trades during the day, and put up their shutters at dusk, as if they had closed their eyelids to prepare for sleep. Of these two sides our young band invariably chose the immoral one as the scene of their night exploits. They cared little about promenading before the closed windows of upright trunkmakers, chemists, and print publishers. They liked the glare of the gas as much as a cat likes the warmth of the fire, and it was before the full blaze of oyster-shops, supper-rooms, and taverns, that these lads carried on their professional labours. Until the busy time of the evening arrived, the boys would loiter about Windmill-street, watching the crowd flock to the Casino, hoping that good luck might throw them a penny for opening some cab- door, and putting their ragged coat-tails against the muddy wheels to protect the dresses of those alighting. They stood looking down the narrow street, gazing listlessly at the red and blue lamps placed like illuminated posters over the supper-room doors, until any vehicle drove up, when all of them would dart forward in a body, more as- if they were going to attack and rifle the cab than act as ragged lacqueys. To vary the monotony of door-openiug, the young gentlemen would sometimes amuse themselves by peeping over the red silk curtains of the " Cafe de la Regence" at the corner, either making faces at the coffee- drinkers within, or flattening their noses against the plate-glass until they were as white as button-mushrooms, much to the horror of the lady with the accroclie-coeurs flourished upon her cheeks, who was seated in state behind the comptoir. Determined not to lose a chance for legitimate begging, the boys carried paper with them to accommodate gentlemen whose cigars had gone out ; and if any such luckless person chanced to approach, instantly the "spills" were lighted at the convenient jets at the cafe door, and thrust up to the smoker's countenance, more as though they were about to singe him like a chicken than tender a civility. So as not to interfere with each other in their begging expeditions, the gang would separate, and whilst some crossed the road to that side of Piccadilly which is a medley of hotels, betting-rooms, and restaurants, to act as self-appointed door-openers to the crowds en- PAVED WITH GOLD. 109 tering the tavern known as " the noted house for Brighton Tipper," others would make for the Opera Colonnade to fascinate the French gentlemen with their bounding exercises, whilst the remainder of the gang prowled about generally, either energetically sweeping the flag- stones before some well-dressed idler, or officiously dusting the boots or scraping off the splashes from the trousers of the first person who happened to be standing still. In fact, they elected themselves to numerous offices, all of a more or less useless character, and in the greater number of instances it would have been more agreeable to the favoured individual if they had not shown him such delicate atten- tions. The boys had very knowingly arranged a number of plaintive re- quests that were peculiarly suitable to the occasion. It was the in- variable custom of the Duck, when he chanced to be outside a tavern door, to ask, gigglingly, for " half a pint o' beer to drink his honour's health." If, whilst Mike was gazing in at a baker's window, admiring the pale red tarts, or longing for the hard-crusted Scotch buns, so temptingly slashed with the snuff-coloured preserve — if, we say, he caught the eye of any passer-by, he would instantly hint that he was on the point of starvation, and beg a penny " to buy a poor orphan boy a mossel of bread." With that genius which usually characterised all his actions, King Teddy Flight had framed a petition intended to move the hearts of those frequenting tobacconists' shops, for he would ask them, in his most winning tones, " to stand a far den's worth of snuff to a poor boy out of work." But perhaps the most impudent of all these re- quests was the one that Phil had adopted ; for whatever the time of year might be — whether Christmas or Midsummer — he always tendered an oyster-shell to any one he met, begging with an innocent face that they would " please to remember the grotto," adding — although it was a nightly request — "that it only came once a year." A favourite rendezvous for the tattered rips was in Coventry- street, in front of the fish-shop where the barrel-shaped lamps hang from the first-floor balcony. They delighted to watch the row of aproned men who passed the evening of their lives opening oysters. To attract attention, King Flight was in the habit of requesting any customer who might be sipping his bivalves to " chuck him one," — a demand which was seldom responded to. These impertinent urchins were also fond of criticising the feasters and their mode of eating, making rude observations which caused many of the cus- tomers to feel very uncomfortable and nervous. "He don't take no winegar with his'n," Mike would remark. Or Phil would cry out, " Look at that chap, he swallows 'em like soup ;" or if anybody happened to drop one of the slippery luxuries, the whole " school" would roar out, as the glossy dainty slid along the sawdust until it was covered as with bread crumbs, " You've dropped one, master, give it us." Phil used to like gazing at these fish-shops, with the window dressed out with fresh green salads and crimson lobsters, until it was as gay as a bed of geraniums. He delighted in touching the quires of dried haddock that looked stiff as untanned leather, and he wondered 110 PAVED WITH GOLD. why the lobsters should always have the end of their cactus-looking claws bound round with string, as if they had been clumsily repaired like the leg of a table. The big crabs, buff as hard-baked pies, and some of them lyiug on their backs and showing their hairy legs parted down the middle, were especial favourites of his. And so were the brick-red crayfish, with their nutmeg-grater backs, and their feelers sticking out like riding-whips ; and so strong was the boy's curiosity concerning this " lobster's big brother," that nothing but the presence of the men in the shop prevented him from taking one out of the window for the mere pleasure of opening its springy tail, that was always tucked under like that of a frightened dog. By eleven o'clock every shop in the Haymarket is in full swing of custom, and as you look down the street towards Charing- cross, every house seems to have been decorated with lanterns like booths at a fair. Even the long line of cabs that stretches the entire length of the place is dotted with lamps, for they are most of them "Hansoms," and have a bright speck of light fixed in front of the hood. A noise fills the air sufficient, you would think, to rouse all London, for besides the shouting, organs are playing by the kerb-stone, and bands are serenading outside public-house doors — the artiste on the cornet exerting himself till his face looks all cheeks, like a prize pig's. Boys dressed up as Highlanders strut along, making their bagpipes scream out, like railway whistles, the favourite jerky airs of Scotland, drowning for a time the voices of the children bawling out " My Mary Ann" and " Bobbing Around" in the gutter. At the French restaurants, suppers are being dressed with great vigour, as may be seen by. a peep down the area railings, where men in white jackets, with caps flat as plates on their head, are discovered handing about little copper saucepans, or stirring steaming mixtures, which at the first glance look like linseed poultices. Public-houses are so full, that many who would enter come back again after peeping in at the swing-doors, for they find the " bars" four deep with drinkers, who are shouting out their orders to the girl behind the bar, and making her work at the groaning beer-engines with the energy of a sailor pumping at a sinking vessel. The cabmen have all left their vehicles to add to the mob on the pavement, and they form groups about the horse-pails belonging to the stand, either joking with the passers-by, many of whom they are acquainted with, or sparring innocently in the road, giving each other playful blows and cuffs, that would be sufficient to destroy the equi- librium of an ox. Everybody, from the man carrying as many bouquets in each hand as a Bucklesbury waiter does plates, to the little girl who begs for her mother who is waiting round the corner, seems to look upon the proceedings of the evening as a kind of scramble, in which so much money is to be recklessly thrown away, and those that fight and push the hardest will get the larger share. After all, the oyster and supper-rooms are the striking features of this peculiar place. Shop fronts are taken out that the stock of chops and steaks, and plates of puce coloured kidneys, may tempt the hungry PAVED WITH GOLD. Ill to spend their half-crowns in the establishment. Every device has been thought of for displaying with advantage the fish within ; semi- circles of crabs lie on their backs with lemons between their black- tipped claws, as if they were going to toss them in the air a la Risley. At one house mounds of hook-backed prawns are piled up in pyramids like pink basket-work ; at another wells have been sunk in the marble slab to receive the oysters that are placed one over the other like scale armour, or some of the opened bivalves are spread out on a big dish, where they glitter under the gas jets like part of a washed-out peacock's tail. Lower down, nearer the Opera, the supper-room proprietors have endeavoured to add the sale of Opera tickets to that of fish, and admissions to the pit at 8s. 6d, stand side by side with pickled salmon at Is. per pound, and cases of opera-glasses are fancifully surrounded by borders of lobsters. There are mysterious supper-rooms, too, such as at the " Blue Posts" and the " Cafe de Paris," where no display at all has been at- tempted to entice custom. Broughams with lighted lamps drive up, and rustling forms dart across the pavement and into the doorways. Divans, too, are plentiful enough, and the " Ottoman," the " Turkish," and the "Algerine," vie with one another for the superiority of trade; but the " Turkish" seems to have won the day. It basin the window a chalky picture of a plain-looking lady of the harem reclining at full length on a divan ; it has lithographs of the Trench troops winning the battles of the Alma and Inkerman, and arranged all about are spangle- ornamented pouches and amber mouthpieces, and pipes as long as fishing-rods. Sometimes the Parisian Turk who is making his fortune at this house exhibits himself for a time in his rich Oriental costume at the swing-doors of his divan, and having played with his long moustache, to allow his jewelled fingers to sparkle by the lamps a bit, goes back again to collect the sixpences owing for his Mocha. When the London season is on and the Opera open, then, as the night advances, the Haymarket becomes choked up with carriages ordered to "fetch" at eleven the red, white, and blue cashmere cloaks that have been flirting, and chatting out the evening, thoroughly in- different as to whether Amina should fall off that terrible nine-inch plank or not, or the roguish Bosina ultimately marry her tenor lover. Now the street gains additional importance and profit. The night broughams, the lofty chariots, the genteel fly, all crowd together, hiding from view the centre line of vulgar cabs as completely as a spaniel in the tall grass. The footmen take their ease at their public- house until the howl of the link boy shall summon them to duty. The powdered retainer from Belgrave-'square graciously drinks from the full pot that the greasy-hatted attendant from Barnsbury-park, Islington, has admiringly offered him, for the humanizing effects of porter soften his proud aristocratic soul. The silk-stockinged coach- man lolls on his hammer-cloth as on a couch, chatting condescendingly with the check-trousered fly-driver who has paid for the hot gin-and- water. By-and-by the mob of drab-coated 'servitors advance to the colonnade, some to stand inside the grand entrance which commands a view of stairs covered with crimson drugget, while others, to kill the time and get rid of the smell of tobacco, air themselves by hanging 112 PAVED WITH GOLD. about the stage door in the hope of catching a glance at some Madlle. Pettito, or captivating with a love at first sight those delights of the ballet, Mesdames Tootsi and Pootsi. Presently, gentlemen looking unnaturally fashionable, emerge from the eight-and-sixpenny entrance, all humming the grand finale as they pack up their binocular glasses. Then the footmen knowing that the opera is over, become agitated. In a few moments mighty names are shouted out by husky-voiced men, and my lord's carriage comes swinging to the kerb-stone, and my lady's brougham darts up as if it were trying to smash itself against the columns. Now, the Street-loungers form a double row like a human palisade, to see the " company" come out. Ladies with carefully dressed hair skip across the pavement, holding up their dresses as on a rainy day, and jump into little bandbox vehicles which they fill like a chair. Steps are clattered down, and old gentlemen with pink heads are hoisted up by straining lacqueys. Now slowly advances the big clarence from the livery stable, the gaunt horse shrinking from the pressure of the collar, despite the whip that whistles like a breeze about his big hips. Those who have hired the vehicle plunge head first into its drab interior, and the crowd, startled at the number, count them with increasing amazement as yet another dress bounds past. Nobody could have enjoyed the Opera nights with a greater gusto than did Phil and his companions. Had they been consulted on the subject of the Lyric Drama, they would have expressed themselves in terms of unqualified approbation upon the great good it effected, for they not unfrequently picked up more money in the half-hour after the performance was over than they had made by the entire day's hard begging and tumbling. Their peculiar business was either to run for cabs, or else to open the doors of such as had been fetched. The boys, politely to avoid disputes with the police, always tendered their services to those ladies and gentlemen, who, in their hurry to get home, had wandered a short distance from the theatre, and were Helplessly staring about them in the hope of hailing a stray vehicle. On these occasions all the boys separated, that none might inter- fere with another's scramble. One very wet night, when the rain had been falling all day long, and had converted the streets to level plains of liquid slush, into which the lamps were reflected as into a canal, Phil, who had only made twopence — and that was for turning a mad cat out of a single lady's coal-cellar — trotted down to the Opera House, offering up supplications to " luck" that he might earn the threepence necessary for a night's lodging at Mrs. O'Donovan's. Just as the music-loving public were rising from their intellectual feast, the rain came down in streams of water as if the clouds above were being wrung like wet blankets. " Here's a soaker !" thought the young Bohemian, looking about him with delight, as he paddled ankle-deep in the mud ; " they'll be drowned as safe as caught fleas if they tries to swim home in their Opera kicksies." Presently a gentleman, "carrying milk-pails," as the boys called it — that is, with a lady on each arm — advanced up the colonnade, PAYED WITH GOLD. 113 gazing mournfully at the rain that came down straight as iron wires. Three or four times did the attentive beau shout out " Hi !" to the passing cabs. Phil had seen this group in the distance, and was gal- loping towards them, his naked feet slapping the pavement like fish on a marble slab. " If we have to stay here all night, "William, I'm not going through that," said one of the ladies, pointing to the shower-bath without. " I should spoil everything I've got on !" added the other damsel, who wore a light-blue tissue dress, that in two seconds would have pulped like silver paper. The gentleman, who was strong and manly, muttered something about " coming out with women who were afraid of a drop of water," when Phil, bounding up to them, exclaimed, as he pulled at his hair like a check-string, " Shall I fetch a cab, yer honour?" He only heard one of the ladies direct him to "go directly, like a good boy," and off he flew among the vehicles, shouting out, as he passed, " Who wants an out-and-out job ?" He ducked under horses' necks, he sidled between wheels that went within an inch of his naked feet, but every conveyance he ran up to seemed engaged. He saw Mike go by, seated like a nobleman on a box, and in vain he offered him. a penny for bis " find." Some of the cabmen, although taken, asked him "where to ?" and seemed in- clined to play their retaining fares false, but Phil's answer of " ever such a way" was evidently not distinct inducement enough to warrant their being dishonourable. At length, as the rain fell heavier and heavier, the boy thought the best method was to mount beside the first driver he passed ; so up he clambered, saying, " Why, where've you been to ? I was a-lookin' for you ever such a whiles, all over." " Oh, were it you as was the boy wot engaged me ?" asked the man. " Why, in course it was," answered Phil, with assumed indigna- tion, " and a fust-rate fare it is too, with a glass of spirits at the end of it." He had been absent some twenty minutes, hunting for the vehicle, but " his people" had not moved from where he left them, which proved to Phil that cabs were very scarce indeed that night, and made him think a shilling would not be too much for his trouble. Nothing could exceed the gallantry displayed by "the young sweeper, as he offered his hand, dirty as a cheese-rind, to assist the ladies into the vehicle, or twisted his body round so that his tattered skirt might cover the dirty wheel ; and when at last the door was closed, and the time had come to receive his payment — if any — he stood, wet through as a dog at the Serpentine, grinning like a hurdy- gurdy boy, and saying, in supplicating accents, " Kemember a poor boy, miss ! Very wet, sir ! It's the last cab left on the rank, mum ! Took me half an hour, sir !" "Mind you pay the poor boy well, William," said one of the ladies, whilst the other added, " He must have caught his death, poor child." " Here's more than you ever had in your life before," cried the i 114 PAYED WITH GOLD. gentleman, slipping, as the vehicle drove off, what Phil thought was sixpence into his hand. . Master Merton had got into the hahit of mistrusting his fellow man ; so, disregarding the elegant appearance of the gentleman, he bit at the coin to see if it were a good one. He had his doubts about its genuineness, for it felt very heavy, and nervously he ad- vanced to a lamp to examine it. It was half a sovereign ! Directly he beheld it he clenched it up in his hand as suddenly as if he had been catching a fly, for fear anybody stronger than himself had been watching him. Then he sneaked off, still looking around him in mistrust, until he came to a deserted court, and there, raining as it was, he sat down on a step to feast his eyes on his treasure. He turned it over and over as a monkey does a bit of biscuit ; he read by the gas-lamp the inscription on both sides of the coin, and he weighed it on the tips of his fingers, and made it ring upon the muddy stones, wiping it carefully on his coat when he was tired of the music. How often he had seen these golden coins behind the bars of public-houses, and wondered if he should ever have one of his own. He had seen little wooden bowls full of them ab the money-changers', and he had stood there by the half-hour thinking over the number of things he could buy with only one of the little bright discs. Then he grew grateful to the donors, and suddenly remembered how beautiful the two ladies were " with nothing on their heads but flowers, and only pink capes on their bare shoulders ;" and his heai't also inclined very much towards the gentleman, and he regretted that he had not heard where the cabman had been told to drive to, that he might have done his benefactor some service in return for his gene- rosity, if it were only to sweep a crossing before his door or caten- wheel in front of the parlour window for the ladies to see him. As it was, Phil thrust the half-sovereign into hi§ cheek, that being the safest purse he knew of, and, determining to say nothing about his wealth to his brothers in mud, he scampered off to find them. On a fine night, what is called "the fun" of the Haymarket seldom begins before one o'clock, for by that time gentlemen of lively dispositions have imbibed enough strong drink to render them reckless of consequences. Most of the visitors, too, have just finished supper at that hour, and feel good-humoured under the effects of the meal. The men and women who have come there to sell fruit and flowers have doubled their prices, and are plying their trade with the greatest industry, displaying their bouquets whenever they see a gentleman talking to any one, in the hope that he may be made to buy the extravagant nosegay, or thrusting baskets of expensive but tempt- ing plums into the centre of conversing groups, and placing the male portion of them in the uncomfortable position of having to appear mean if they refuse to purchase, however earnestly they may wish to escape the outlay. It is about this time, too, that " rows" begin to take place. Should the police attempt the capture of any illegal practical joker, rescues PAYED WITH GOLD. 115 are attempted by his friends, and a crowd soon collected, which sways about the roadway, the shiny top of the officer's hat always forming the centre of the riot. Under the influence of drink, gentlemen "who do not take their liquor kindly," as the Duck expresses it, grow pugnacious, and like the retainers of the Mon- tagues and Capulets, will fall to and fight on the slightest pretext, whether it be the " bite of a thumb at them," or the using of dis- respectful expressions, or a too vigorous push with the shoulder. The young crossing-sweepers enjoy this time immensely, for though, to quote the words of his Majesty King Teddy Flight, "drunken gentlemens is always either jolly or spiteful," yet they do not mind running the risk of kicks when the chances are equally balanced by halfpence. Should any gentleman who has been too thirsty at his supper, evince any inclination to joke with our muddy community, the. boys, far from checking these attempts at familiarity, rather use their utmost endeavours to encourage the acquaintance. Ou one occasion, the " school" having discovered a couple of gentlemen limp with liquor, and bending backwards and forwards with the elasticity of foils made from the best steel, instantly surrounded them and commenced tumbling. As these unsteady revellers were in that condition when lamp-posts and houses revolve and spin around, their giddiness found no relief from having half a dozen pairs of legs twisting like wheel- spokes before their eyes. " Go along, will you," hiccupped one of the inebriated couple, dealing out a slash with his cane, which fell upon the thigh of Mr. Mike, and drew forth a long howl like tuning an organ-pipe. The sufferer retired to the nearest lamp-post, there to rub his wound and make a variety of faces expressive of nipping agony ; but the other lads still continued their exercise, though they cautiously increased the distance between their legs and the stinging cane. " Give us a shillin' and we'll go," was the offer made by the Buck, as he saw the couple blink their heavy eyelids and flinch under the torture of the " caten-wheel." " Go and be hung !" was the gruff answer ; but the gentleman had scarcely finished speaking before he burst out laughing violently, as if some comic idea had suddenly tickled his fancy, and when his merriment had subsided sufficiently to allow him to talk, he, for some drunken freak, offered to purchase the brooms of all the boys at the rate of one shilling each, a bargain which the urchins concluded as quickly as possible lest the bidder might change his silly mind. Then with the muddy stumps under their arms these two big men staggered up and down the Haymarket, laughing immoderately at the immense fun they imagined themselves to be enjoying. Speaking as clearly as their thick speech would let them, they began by imitating, as closely as their drunkenness would permit, the manners and cus- toms of Dutch girls, asking everybody that passed to " buy a broom, my dear," and occasionally thrusting the dirty article they jocosely offered for sale into the face of those that refused to purchase. All these proceedings were highly amusing to the gang of young sweepers who followed the two gentlemen, cheering vociferously i 2 116 paved wrra gold. everything they did, and dancing closely round and about them, in the hopes that they might, in time, be sufficiently enraged to restore the brooms to their former owners, by throwing them at their heads. When the two tipsy gentlemen were tired of imitating the Dutch girls, they thought it would be amusing if they pretended to be cross- ing-sweepers ; and to work they went, brushing away at the pavement before the couples who were walking about, and taking off their hats to beg quite in a professional style. Meeting with but little success or applause at this pleasant pastime, they changed it to that of flourishing the broom in the air and dancing about like wild Indians, occasionally playfully varying the entertainment by knocking off the hats of the lookers-on, a feat which ended in getting the unfortu- nate drunkards into trouble, by being, in their turn, knocked about by a broad-shouldered, thick-necked man, who, if he was not a mem- ber of the ring, certainly had the most wonderful-looking nose out of "the fancy," and who toppled over the two idiots in a style worthy of the most accomplished pugilist. When the genuine crossing-sweepers saw the amateurs sprawling in the road, they quietly picked up the brooms and walked away, de- claring that " them two was the queerest charackters out," and wish- ing — with little regard for the morality of mankind — that they could only meet with such a couple every night of their lives. It was about this time that the Duck, finding that some novelty was sadly wanted to give a spirt to street-begging, introduced into the Haymarket his celebrated feat of " standing on his nose." It has been much doubted whether Captain Drake was really the first to think of this eccentric gymnastic exercise. One Judy Jack, who was intimate with the Duck — being in the same profession, though he carried on business in Camden Town — has since brought forward evidence of a rather strong nature to prove that it was he who had taught the Duck the knack of performing the trick, and had even showed him how he must " bear on his hands to take the weight off the nfcse, or he'd dent it in as easy as a trod thimble." The Captain's method of proceeding was to accost wild-looking young men, and after asking for a copper for poor little Jack, to add, " I'll stand on my nose for a penny, your honour ;" and if the tempting offer were accepted, up went the Duck's nimble legs, and there he rested with his face flat to the ground, at the same time drawing the attention of his patrons, in a voice resembling that of a person afflicted with a severe head cold, to the fact that his " dose was slap agin the bavebelt." After each night's labours, the gang were accustomed to adjourn to the Jury-house, as they termed the steps around the portico of St. Martin's Church, there to reckon up what they had made during the day. It was usually about three o'clock in the morning when this business meeting took place, but the young rogues, far from feel- ing sleepy, were generally as fresh as bees, and in the best of spirits, especially if the "takings" had been equal to their expectations. PAVED WITH GOLD. 117 Lolling against the massive iron railings, the counting up of halfpence would proceed in clerk-like silence. " Fourteenpence !" Mike would cry out when his reckoning was over. " None so dusty, neither !" "Elevenpence harpenny," would call out in his turn the King; " that* 8 better than smashing your leg." " One-and-seven," Phil would say ; and, imitating his companions' style of expression, he would add, " and nobody's eye put out." On hearing this amount, the Duck, who for some unknown reason always pretended to be the least fortunate of the party, would beseech Phil to give him twopence for luck. If Phil saw no just reason for granting this request, Mr. Drake would decrease the amount asked for to one halfpenny, and if that gift was also refused, he would beg pathetically that his wealthy young friend would, when he took his morning's pen'orth of coffee at the street stall, spare him a little of it in the saucer. There was no pride about the Duck, and he always took things as they came, and, indeed, not unfrequently when they didn't. f During the fag end of the season, when the gay idlers of London had gone to the sea-side to pick up the health they had thrown away in the Haymarket, the troop did not make such excellent incomes as they could have wished ; indeed, their expenditure not unfrequently exceeded their gains by exactly the threepence which Mrs. O' Do- novan required for the night's lodging, and much to that lady's dis- gust she would be forced to give her young gentlemen credit. The establishment of Mrs. O'Donovan being avowedly conducted on the ready-money principle, and the wardrobes of the youths, consisting only of the few rags they, by great ingenuity, managed, with the aid of pins and strings, to carry on their backs, the landlady grew nervous when the amount due to her amounted to sixpence a head. At such a time, this severely punctual woman, knowing the habits of the boys, would rise from her pillow, and in the blue light of dawn suddenly appear before the assembled younkers as they sat at their accounts on the Jury-house steps. The Duck, who was always the heaviest defaulter, would instantly endeavour to escape from the cold, determined gaze of his creditor's grey eye ; but her voice would pull him back like a hand. "Misther Drake !" she would say, shaking her head as if prepared to quarrel — " Misther Drake, oi want mee monee. Oi'm a harrud- worrucking woman, Misther Drake." "Why, I never seed you working vet!" would equivocate the Duck. " You owe me saxpence, Mr. Drake," she would continue, without heeding the reply, " and oi'll thank you kindly for that same." She waited in silence for a few seconds, gazing with dreadful sternness at the other debtors ; but on the Duck beginning to whistle, she lost her temper, and broke out wildly, " You idle vaggabone ! and is it for the loikes of such as ye that an honest woman is to be turruned out of house and home, whilst ye're larruking about the strates, living on the best and squandering mee monee. Misther Drake, oi want mee rent." 118 PAVED WITH GOLD. "Why don't you distrain ?" asked the Duck. "Is it distrain, ye say," roared the lady, "yer bundle o' filth ye! It's at the rag-shop oi must carry yer thin, yer villin, and its onlee brown paper they 'ud make o' yer at the best o' times. Pay mee sax- pence, Misther Drake." " Why, it's months since I've seed a sixpence," said the Duck, in persecuted accents. " I wish I had, and I'd have eaten somethin' in- stead of never tasting nothen all the blessed day." " That's a loie, Misther Drake," screamed the landlady ; " you've had onneyons, for oi can smell them heare, and enough to knock me down. I want mee saxpence oi've wurruked harrud for, Mr. Drake." " Why don't you ask the other chaps, 'stead of only bullying me ?" complained the debtor. The fiery Mrs. O'Donovan was trembling with rage, shaking like the hand of a drinker. She was about to follow the Duck's advice, and had commenced her attack upon the gang by howling out, " Ye herd o' plundering locusts" . . . when the whole of the troop took to their legs and darted away from her, leaving her to shake her fists and scream after their retreating forms. As they knew it would be useless to return home in the absurd hopes of being allowed to sleep there, the entire party made the best of their way to St. James's Park, and, having climbed the railings, they silently sought out some convenient spot that would serve them for a bedstead. At length they discovered what Teddy Plight termed a place that had been "made o' purpose, knowing they were coming." The overhanging boughs of some valuable shrubs, the names of which were carefully painted on the labels near their roots, formed a kind of gipsy's tent, and the withered leaves that had fallen covered the ground with a soft, dry mattress, almost equal, they declared, to a truss of straw. Into this branch-curtained retreat the lads crept on all fours, one after another, to enjoy their " doss," as, in their slang, they called sleep. " Of all beds these here flower-beds is the primest for a doss," said Mike, " it's as soft as feathers !" " If we pulls our coats over our ears, and then scrunches together in a lump, we shall do prime," was the advice of the experienced Duck. " The last in bed blows out the glim," jocosely remarked Master Jim. Then, huddling together like a litter of kittens, the boys fell asleep ; some with their head resting on the stumps of trees as a pillow, others with their legs and arms sprawling about, so that the limbs were crossed together like wicker-work. Such was the kind of life these miserable lads were accustomed to lead. An existence that had no pleasure in i't beyond its daring and its lawlessness; where liberty was purchased at the expense of rags and hunger ; and which was gradually training them for the gaol, by teach- ing the boys that the least laborious method of earning their bread was v< PAVED WITH GOLD. 119 by transgressing the laws of society, instead of conforming to them. Already they were ranked among the outcasts of the world, those for whose safe keeping policemen had been appointed and prisons built. Phil, from living among these boys, had picked up their slang, and forgotten the u good words" taught him at his school as completely as a child sent to a foreign land loses its native language. His mind, too, had taken their stamp — the one that often seals a destiny — and his morality had become as muddy as his rags. When well-to-do people passed near him in the streets, they often placed their hands in their pockets, mistaking him for a thief, for there was a cunning side-look in his eyes ; and when he sneaked after them to beg, his step was more like that of one ready to decamp than bent on following. He had been one year at this sad work. He had passed through the winter, treading the snow with frostbitten feet, and cuddling together the rags that fluttered about him like a storm-rent sail. The only time he had known warmth was when he was scraping the snow from before the houses, and the only variety to his miserable life was when the boys pelted each other with snow-balls for the half- pence that were thrown to them, or swept open spaces on the ice for skaters at the Serpentine. But when the warm spring returned, when the chilblained feet had healed, and the rags, holey as a worm-eaten leaf, once more felt warm enough, then Phil forgot the wise resolutions he had made in his time of suffering, and returned, as a matter of course, to his old habits. But for a mere accident he might to his dying day have remained a member of the Associated Crossing Sweepers. Late one night, when all the gang were prowling about the Hay- market like cats in a flower-bed, they saw two gentlemen lolling against the post at the corner of Windmill-street, and evidently wishing they could hit upon some amusement to relieve them from the hard work of having nothing to do. By their long moustaches and the hair close cut behind, the quick-eyed and experienced young beggars instantly recognised them as belonging to her Majesty's Service, though whether foot or cavalry they neither knew nor cared. As pigeons to peas, the boys flew to the perfumed sons of Mars. The Duck instantly volunteered to stand on his nose and beat time with the soles of his" feet to the tune of " Is the Battle over, Mother ?" for the trumpery equivalent of one penny. The King, Edward Plight, ever willing to meet the times and dis- tance competitors, offered to turn head over heels as rapidly as a pith ball rotates on a fountain, for the totally insufficient remuneration of one halfpenny. Phil, whose business principles were small profits and quick returns, endeavoured to undersell his rivals by proposing to caten-wheel until he was black in the face for the small charge of one farthing. " Well, then, the whole lot of you go to work," said one of. the officers; and a second afterwards the solo with the foot accompaniment 120 PAViJD WITH GOLD. had commenced, and the other lads were twisting about as rapidly as the paddles of a steamer; but just as the entertainment was half over it was unfortunately interrupted by the approach of a policeman, who, taking off his belt, dealt the performers such lusty blows with the buckle that they were glad to spring to their feet and scamper away. As the dogs driven from a tripe-shop return to gaze again at the wet washleather-looking dainty, so did these beggar boys once more appear before the officers as soon as they had given the policeman what they called the "lucky dodge." The officers laughed to see the young scamps, as they came up grinning and whining to ask for "the little bit of silver," and they were kind enough to make several inquiries as to whether the easti- gation they had received had hurt them or not. But as to the pay- ment of the money the boys thought they had earned, the gentlemen complained that the performances they had bartered for had not been given, and vowed they would not " cash up" until they had witnessed something more for their money. Then they set the boys a variety of comic tasks. One of the gen- tlemen had a box of dinner pills in his pocket, and four of them were placed in Mike's hand, and he was ordered to swallow them instantly. The boy shuddered with the disgust all lads feel for medicine, and he made a face which drew up all his features into a variety of wrinkles, but as there was scarcely any enormity he would not have committed for one penny, he hastened to the pails by the cab-stand, and ducking his head like a horse, filled his mouth with water, and swallowed the pills as pleasantly as if they had been four black-currants. The next boy ordered to stand forth was King Teddy, and he was led, by the eccentric gentlemen on town, into a pastrycook's shop, and there, being mounted on one of the marble-topped tables, he was ordered, like a monkey on a drum-head, to begin his exercises. The young lady in the shop behind the pewter hot-water apparatus where the veal-and-ham pies are kept tepid, screamed out, as the cobwebby Flight entered, " Turn that dirty boy out ! I won't have him here !" But those who promised him sixpence ordered him to advance, and although he plainly heard the fearful words, " Run for the police !" the naughty child commenced his gymnastics. "When Master Teddy, growing nervous, asked whether " Please, sir, he might go now," instead of the " Yes" he hoped for, he was commanded to caten-wheel the whole length of the shop, despite the crowd of customers, and in he plunged, as into water, making the tart-eaters fly before him. His legs revolved within an inch of trays of cracknels, and nearly brought down dishes of custards, or sent yellow jellies quivering over the oilcloth, and all the time parasols and canes beat at him as he trundled along. Even now these officers would not give the "little sixpence" that was once more implored for. A task of a decidedly cruel nature was given to the whole band, but nevertheless it was one from which these inhuman raga- muffins did not shrink. " Go and pull that tipsy man over," was the order ; and like dogs at a weak cat the pack flew at the staggering drunkard, and upset him as easily as a ninepin. Their work completed, they once more PAYED WITH GOLD. 121 asked for their money ; but no ! the gentlemen were enjoying them- selves too much with the sport to put so speedy an end to the fun. These officers and gentlemen, thinking over what mischief they could next invent, happened to catch sight of a woman going by, and Captain Drake, as the biggest boy of the troop, was directed to " go and sweep mud over her." "With a vigorous dig of his broom the Duck sent a broad sheet of liquid dirt against the poor soul's dress, covering it as with a patch of brown paper. She turned round in wonder to see what had struck her, pulling her cotton skirt about her with a look of disgust and astonishment that made the troop and their fashionable abettors shout with laughter. Why does not Phil roar and dance with the enjoyment of the mis- chief, like his companions ? His face has turned as white as if a sickness had suddenly smitten him. As he saw the woman's features, his hair was lifted from his head, as when a gust of wind blows against the temples. He thanked Heaven that she did not see him among her insulters — that poor nurse that used to call him her " own pretty boy ;" the kind, patient creature that, even when he richly deserved it, would not hurt her Phil, but would rather kiss the pouting lips of the sulking boy, and coax him to laugh away his ill-humours. Time was when Phil was innocent, and he had impulses whicli gave him no time for thought, but would have sent him bounding forward at the joy of seeing that face again. But now he is one of the foxes of the street, and as he would not be seen in bad company, he sneaks round the corner, and runs along back courts, to reappear again higher up in the same street ; and there he stops till his Nurse Hazlewood shall advance towards him. Whilst he is impatiently waiting her approach, he runs into the road to watch what she is doing, and when he catches glimpses of her through the openings in the moving crowd, he perceives her pointing to her dress, and ap- pealing indignantly to the lookers-on. The muscles of his face twitch again, and his fingers work like a beetle's claws, as he thinks to himself, " If she only knew I was one of them that did it !" Presently she advances, and, panting and trembling with anxiety, he creeps after her. Twice he calls out " Mother !" but in so low a voice that he is not heard ; and. he is glad of it, too, for he dreads the look he knows she must give him when she sees her Phil a ragged street boy. More than once the thought of " runaway" has entered his mind, but the wish to hear of Bertie is stronger than the fear of any scoldings he may receive. At last the nervous boy pulls at her shawl, and, as his nurse looks round, his head falls on his bosom, and he says, " It's me, mother." She knows the voice in a moment, and, taking that head with the dust-coloured hair between her hands, she raises it to the full glare of the gas, and mutters, as if to herself, " Good God ! it's Phil." The poor soul is silent with grief, but the boy thinks the scolding is coming, and he stammers out, " It's no good a-rowing a chap, it can't be altered now." "Are those the only clothes you've got ?" she asked. 122 PAYED WITH GOLD. As Phil played with his fingers, he answered, " Yes ; and the best's uncommon bad, ain't it?" And then he peeped up to see if she was laughing. But her countenance was full of grief. " And what are you doing to earn a living ?" she inquired. " Oh, knocking and rowing about, mother ; doing a job at any- thing" "Oh dear! oil dear!" she sighed, "that my own Phil should come to this !" And she took up his hand, but dropped it again when she saw how black and dirty it was. " Oh that I should live to see my boy in this state. Dear ! dear ! I almost wish I hadn't met you, for I used to think of you as you once were, with your pretty pink face and child's talk, and now, when you come into my mind, I must always see you dirty and in tatters, and with the words and ways of bad people in the streets. Oh, I wish I hadn't lived to see you, Phil." " "Where's the use of crying, mother ? That won't do no good," the boy stammered out. " It is hard, after bringing you up and nursing you as if you were one of my own, to see you turn bad like this, with only rags to your back, and perhaps dying of hunger." " "Well, if a chap is, I don't see that telling him on it is much help." " God help you !" she faltered, wiping her eyes on her shawl. One or two errand boys had stopped to look at Phil and his nurse, and others, as they passed by, turned round to stare at the weeping woman and the abashed boy by her side, who was trying to take the edge off his despondency by picking to pieces the twigs on his broom. Observing that they were noticed, the pair strolled towards Leices- ter-square. For some time they walked by the railings around the enclosure, neither of them saying a word, the woman sighing and weeping, poor soul ! and the boy with his heartlike a lump of lead in his bosom, although be tried to look as if he " did not care," and kicked at the stones that were in his way or tossed halfpence with apparently the greatest indifference. Sometimes he would look up at her slyly to see if she were still crying, and then finding that her grief was not allayed, he grew im- patient and jerked his head on one side, as much as to say, " I can't stand this much longer." At last he summoned courage to speak. "Mother, where's Bertie ?" he asked, but in a meek tone, half-expecting the informa- tion would be refused. Turning round suddenly, so that her tearful face was looking full at him, she cried out in fear, " You shan't go there !" " Why not ? "What have I done to her, I should like to know ?" he grumbled out. "No, Phil," the woman said, excitedly, "you shan't go tempting her into your ways and courses. If you've gone wrong, at least I'll keep her honest and good. You shan't go near her, I tell you." " You are a-laying it on," he answered impertinently ; " one would think I was everything bad to hear you talk." " God only knows what you are, Phil," the poor thing moaned out ; PAVED WITU GOLD. 123 " but I know what Bertie is, and how good and pure is the heart within her. No, you shan't go there from any telling of mine, so don't ask me." " Now look here, mother," began the boy, after swallowing two or three times, as if his throat were dry, " you seem to think I ain't all right. But I am all right — none righter. "What have I done, I should like to know ? Of course I begs ; but that ain't stealing. A feller must live." (' " I knew you couldn't steal, Phil," was her mild reply, and it cut him the more because he knew himself better than she did. " "Well, then, what do you mean ? Don't you think I love Bertie ? Now, look here, if a chap was to try and do her any harm, I'd go in at him if he was as big as a house. I tell you that you and her is the only two I like in the world — except Jim a little bit. I've been waiting to see you this year gone, for something told me we should meet. Many a time I've run afore people to see if it was you, and this is the way you serves a feller when you do run up agin him." He was crying and rubbing the knuckles into his eyes, so that he could not see the kind look with which she turned towards him. He felt her hand rest upon his shoulder, but he shook it off like an angry child. " Now I'll just tell you mother, and it's G-ospel truth, too," the boy continued, sobbing, " when I've been on the crossing, or a caten-wheeling after 'busses, I've often wished tremendous I might catch sight of Bertie. I do like her really ; so you might as well tell me where she lives." As no answer was given, he began to taunt his old nurse : "Ah! it's because I've got rags on you won't notice a chap now." " No, no, my Philip," she cried out, quickly ; " it isn't the rags and mud on your back that grieve me. I was shocked, to be sure, to see the boy I loved and reared as one of my own, looking like a street- beggar, but it's the mud in you that hurts me so deeply. You talk mud, and think mud, Phil, and you mustn't see Bertie." This made the lad angry, and he commenced threatening her. " Mind what you're about, mother, or you'll make me reg'lar wild. If you don't tell me where Bertie lives, may my arm never come straight if I don't get locked up to-night, and have three months of it." He stretched out his little arm to the clouds, and as she, in horror, seized his hand, he continued : " Now mark my words — and I ain't joking — if I have gone wrong, you and Bertie is the only ones as could put me straight again. I'd mind what you might say, but you won't help a feller. If Bertie were to say, ' you shan't caten- wheel again,' I'd give it over as quick as that" — and he snapped his fingers. " There ! that'll show you how fond I am of her. Now, do tell me where she is ; or, if you doubt a feller, take me yourself to see her, and I'll do any mortal thing you choose, as a quits." Like all boys, Phil, now that he had given vent to his anger, be- came very depressed, and his former excitement changed into a pas- sionate flood of tears. All the time he was crying he continued to talk, entreating, with the greatest earnestness, to be told the girl's address, and throwing his arms about him, or hitting the iron railings 124 PAVED WITH GOLD. with his broom, as if lie was venting his spleen upon the metal. If he could only have performed oue tithe of the noble actions he in his rude manner of speech promised his foster-mother should dignify his future career in life, in case she acceded to his entreaties, poor Phil would in himself have furnished virtuous illustrations sufficient for another volume of the Percy Anecdotes. At length the old nurse, seeing what influence his foster-sister possessed over him, and know- ing that whatever counsel the gentle-minded girl gave would be as pure and good as innocence and affection could prompt, acceded to his request. But she affixed these conditions : " You must be there," said she, beginning with stipulation No. 1, " long before seven o'clock in the morning, for it would be as much as Bertie's place is worth if the lady of the house, who has a deal of plate, was to hear of you coming after her in those rags, Phil." " All right," answered Phil, without feeling the least insulted at the remark in his toilette ; " I'll go and sleep all night on the door- step, with my head on the scraper to wake me early." " And you must ring the area bell, mind," was clause No. 2. " Yes, and I am a first-rate hand at ringing bells ; I'll make it sing out like church time." " No, no, you mustn't make a noise, you silly fellow, or else you'll get Bertie turned away." " No ! no ! I forgot. "What a flat I am ! I'll scarce touch it loud enough to wake a weasel." " And you'll promise," was the third condition, " to do as she tells you?'; " Of course I will, upon my sacred civey. Why, if Bertie was to tell me to chuck a stone at the Lord Mayor of London hisself, I'd have a shy at him, if I had to get into his gold coach to take aim." CHAPTEB VI. THE INTERVIEW. The next' morning, long before five o'clock, Phil was leaning against the railings of the house where Bertie lived. He had not been to bed for fear that he might oversleep himself, and miss seeing his foster- sister ; so the moment he could get away from the conversation at the Jury-house he had set out for the place of meeting. • Por nearly two hours the boy had to amuse himself as well as he could in front of those railings, and to endure the annoyance of having arrived too soon at the rendezvous. To help the time along he picked up stones in the road, and had a game by himself at pitch-in-the-hole, looking up anxiously at the house, between the throws, to see if any- body was stirring within. But all the blinds were down, and not a sound could he hear, listen as attentively as he would. The silence made him feel sleepy, and to shake off the drowsiness he attempted to PAVED WITH GOLD. 125 establish an acquaintanceship with an old black cat that was resting motionless as a miniature sphinx in a corner of the area. First he called out "Puss! puss!" in his most captivating tones; but the animal having opened its amber eyes to take a rapid glance at his cos- tume, seemed to recognise him as belonging to the class it most dreaded, and wisely refused to stir ; upon which the boy, to resent the want of confidence, changed his tactics, and jerked pebbles at it, more to the danger of the kitchen windows than the poor beast, who philo- sophically retired to the dust-hole to finish its doze. At last he heard a great ringing of bells inside the house, and a few moments afterwards the kitchen shutters were opened, and on peeping cautiously down the area he beheld a man in a striped jacket, who was evidently the bed-loving footman the bells had been intended to rouse; and never did he enjoy any pastime more than watching this servant, as he shaved himself at a glass, no larger than a saucepan lid, suspended in the window. Without being aware of it, that foot- man was watched attentively, from the moment when he first lathered a chin as black as a crape band on a white hat, to that satisfactory period when he was passing his hand over the flesh and enjoying its satin-like smoothness. When Phil heard the clock strike six he thought he would take his first pull at the area bell. He felt excessively nervous as the jingle sounded below, scarcely louder than a clock striking, for he knew the barbered footman would come out to speak to him in a contemptuous manner, and Phil, who was a " child of liberty," felt that he really could not stand any " bounce " from a footman. Much to the boy's astonishment, he found that no notice was taken of him or his summons. The menial merely advanced to the window, and having examined him for a minute, by waving his] body about with a parrot-like movement, retired again into the dark recesses of his apartment. After the sixth time of ringing, the kitchen-door was opened to make way for a woman's head, with a dull, stale look about it, caused by her having omitted to wash her face. "What are you worriting for, boy ?" the maid inquired; "can't you stand still and leave that bell alone for a moment, and not go rousing the house ? She'll be here directly." Naturally enough Phil concluded that the " she" referred [to Bertie, so he answered, " Oh, thank you, miss," and felt considerably easier in his mind, though it struck him as being very strange that this young woman should have been acquainted with the object of his visit. It was not long after this that a woman so fat that all her features hung down in pouches which shook as she walked, made her appear- ance, carrying a heavy market-basket, which dragged her sideways like a pail of water. She toiled up the stone steps, smiling at Phil as she said, half-coquettishly, " Ah, your legs is younger than mine." An observation to which the lad mentally responded, " And a jolly sight thinner too, I'll bet, missus." As the cook hoisted the pilferings over the area railings to the boy, Bhe said, " Give this to your mother, my dear, and tell her it's my day out 126 PAVED WITH GOLD. next Sunday, and I shall come round early to dress, and she's to mind and have my pink musling starched ; and ask her to be so good as borrow them tongs agin, for I don't know as I shan't curl my hair." At first Phil stared, and looked into the basket to learn what it meant. When he saw the slices of meat and the half-finished joint mixed up with cold potatoes and remnants of loaves, he burst out laughing, and said, " You've regular took the wrong turning, mum, and lost your way entirely ; I ain't the party as is waiting for this here breakfast." And as he saw the pilfering cook stare with amazement, he added, " If you'll tell a young woman what lives here, of the name of Bertha Hazlewood, that she is wanted, I'll take it as a obligation." " How dare yer come a-ringing at this time in the morning ?" shouted the cook, in a passion. " I shall do nothing of the kind, for your imperence." The knowing street-boy was too well aware that he had the servant in his power to care much for her threats, so he leaned against the railings, and remembering the meat in the basket, said calmly, " Very w r ell, mum, you can do as you like, only mind this here : the family had roast pork for dinner yesterday ; and by-and-by I shall pay my respex to your missus, and jist ask her if she'd like to know where the cold jint is gone to." The result of this threat was, that when Bertie came to speak to Phil, she found him eating a thick slice of bread and meat. The boy was hurt at the look of surprise and disappointment with which his foster-sister greeted him. The last time she had seen him was when they parted at the Nor- wood school, and he was then a bright-faced, promising boy. She had often called to mind the picture of that separation, and how in his sorrow at losing his Bertie he had surlily quarrelled with her, almost as if she had been leaving him of her own free will. Then had come the news that Phil had run away, and she had heard with aching heart the many speculations that had been made as to what would become of him. Whilst others croaked out their evil prophecies, and augured, from the flight of this workhouse bird, the sinful future that awaited him, Bertha, who judged of everything through her love rather than her reason, alone stood up in her Phil's defence. Many a battle of words did she fight with stubborn talkers, arguing, poor girl, till the tears came into her eyes, that her dear brother would push his way honourably through life, and would come back to them again — when many years had passed perhaps — if not a rich, at least a just and upright man. And so often had Bertie in this way argued, even to quarrelling, in Phil's defence, that at last she had, by constant repetition, forced herself to believe that what she hoped for so devoutly was really truth. And now the reality was before her, and her courage and hopes drew back snail-like into her heart at this one touch of truth. There sat the boy she had nightly prayed for, dirty as a dust-heap, and draped in rags that hung from him like the fleece of a muddy sheep. Phil saw her stare, and her gaze cut him to the heart. PAVED WITH GOLD. 127 "Don't look like that, Bertie," lie said; "it's enough to make a feller turn desperate." She did not answer him, but her large eyes were stretched wide open, and her mouth apart. For some time she could not speak ; but at last she gave a sigh, as if the pain of surprise had left her, and her rigid limbs, that had been fixed with wonder, relaxed suddenly, as if tired out by the emotion. " I have been waiting for you a long time, Phil, but " She could not finish the sentence, for there was an unkind thought in it. " I know what you mean by that ' but,' " said Phil ; " you mean all this here." And he pushed his hands among his rags, making them flutter like feathers. Bertie could not answer him, for he had guessed her meaning. " Ah, Bertie, you can't love me half as much as I do you," he whined out, crumbling up the bread he had but a moment before been biting at so hungrily. " I knew you'd be shocked to see me, but, though I was afraid, I came. If it had been the safe death of me, I should have come all the same. You're not altered a bit," he added, looking at her ; " it's only me as is altered." He hoped his sister would have spoken to him, but not a word did she utter. " Come, Bertie," he implored, " give a feller one little word. I've stopped up all night just to hear your voice, and now you won't speak anything. I don't ask you to kiss a feller, or anythink of that sort, but I did think you wouldn't be downright unkind. It takes the life out of one, it do." " And Phil, it has taken the life out of me, too," said Bertie, sadly, " for you were part of what I lived for, and I was waiting so impa- tiently for the day when I should see you once more, that now it has come it kills me." Poor girl, her eyes were running over with tears, though her face was calm and her voice steady. Phil, as he sat on the door-step, shuffled along until he was close to her, and then he felt the hot tears fall upon his upturned face. Now he too could not speak. There was a working in his throat and a tightness in his chest. She saw that the flood-gates of his sorrow were open, and, kneeling close to the crouching boy, she drew his head to hers and kissed him, as a token that the prodigal was loved and forgiven. She could not talk about the past, so they chatted over the future. " Tou must leave this life, Phil," she said ; " it will be ruin to you." ""Well, it ain't much better now," he answered. "I only made ninepence yesterday." " I don't mean ruined for want of money, Phil ; I mean you would grow up a bad man," said the little woman of fifteen. " Just think how mother and me would fret if anything was to happen to you, and we were afraid to talk of you before people." " But what am I to do?" said Phil. "Nobody'll give me work with such clothes as these. I might just as well try to get took on at a bank." After they had been talking together for some time, and he had given her a rough outline of the life he had been leading, Bertie com- menced her good counsels by hinting that washing the face and hands 128 PAVED WITH GOLD. not unfrequently added to the personal appearance. She also sug- gested that stopping up all night was not the natural life that had been ordained for striplings ; and she further continued her admo- nitions by stating that, in order to obtain decent clothing, the first step was to save up some of the daily earnings, and not expend every penny that was given to him, either in purchasing pudding at the cook-shop, or paying gambling debts for lessons at pitch-farthing. But Bertie's moralising lost nearly all its effect from Phil's atten- tion being just then occupied by watching a man who, mounted on the extreme end of a donkey, was coming up the street, leading another of the patient animals by a rope round the neck. This man, to his astonishment, stopped before the very door where he and Bertie were chatting. He saw him dismount, and, kneeling clown, rest his head against the donkey's ribs, and begin milking it into a small measure he drew from his pocket. " Who drinks that stuff ?" asked Phil, turning up his nose in dis- gust. "Stuff indeed!" cried Bertie; "it's very dear stuff, and Miss Tomsey, the lady I read to, takes it as medicine — a pint every day." Phil still kept his eyes fixed on the donkey-man, and, attracted as all lads are by animals, he could not help going up to them and play- ing with their ears. " Ah," said he, " if I could only get a job as a stable-boy, or something, I should be made for life. That's what I'm most fittest for." Bertie, on mere speculation, ventured to ask the vendor of donkey*s milk whether he happened to know of any place vacant just then, where an active, and she added " honest," boy might get employ- ment. " Any charackter ?" asked Mr. Sparkler.' " Oh, I know him well," said Bertie, as Phil scratched his head, not knowing what to answer. " "Well, boys is asked for pretty plentiful just now at Hampstead," answered the man. " Can the young man run ?" " I'll lick any 'bus on the road," said Phil, boastingly. " And has the young man any clothes besides them there things ?" continued Mr. Sparkler, evidently not very pleased with Phil's costume. " Yes," said Bertie, firmly, which made Phil stare at her with surprise. " "Well," said the donkey proprietor, " he can go see my missus, and talk it over with her. Ask for Mrs. Sparkler, donkey-keeper, the Drying-ground, Hampstead, Hollvhock Cottage." " Which is the nearest way there ?" asked Phil, with delight. "Well," said Mr. Sparkler; "keep up the road till you come to the William the Fourth, then turn round as far as the Hare and Hounds, and anybody '11 tell you which is the Trusty Friend, and my place is close by, four doors from the Jolly Sailor." How Phil became a donkey-boy, and how he prospered in his new calling, will be seen in the next chapter. PAYED WITH GOLD. 129 CHAPTEE VII. HAMPSTEAD. Call the world into school, and when the millions are seated in their classes, let the schoolmaster walk among the forms, and ask, " "What is happiness ?" How many guesses will be made at the riddle ? " Glory," roars the soldier. And yet those who have burned cities into dust-heaps, have — when they came to sift the cinders — found little happiness among the ruins. Alexander died of delirium tremens, aged thirty-three ; Miltiades expired in prison ; Siccius Dentatus, the hero of one hundred and forty battles, was assassinated ; Hannibal poisoned himself; Belisarius had his eyes put out ; Caesar was mur- dered ; and Napoleon — everybody knows his fate. " Titles," suggests the politician. But if a short name cannot bring happiness, how can a long one ? — will extending a man's cogno- men, like the lengthening of a ship, add to his qualities ? A firma- ment of stars may decorate a bosom, but — according to Louis XVI. — there are clouds that will overcast even such a heaven. " Eiches," cries the poor man, forgetting that to have more than we can enjoy is the same as not having it at all. Demidoff owned gold mines, but he eat and drank himself a cripple, and what benefit' was his treasure to him ? He died worth millions, and passed the better half of his life in a chair on wheels. The only privilege of his wealth was to prevent others from possessing it. " Health," groans the rich man, turning his back on the labourer, who, although he never knew a day's sickness, sighs heavily over his misery in having to support the most salubrious of families on seven shillings a week. " Beauty," simpers the woman of fashion. A five years' glory and a life's misery ; for even when the beauty is gone, it leaves behind it the insolent remembrance of its possession. "Where did lovely Helen of Troy die ? Did she expire with the serpent of remorse gnaw- ing at her heart, with as sharp a tooth as when the asp of the Nile fastened upon the arm of the splendid Cleopatra ? "What is happiness ? For how many hundred years have stoics and epicureans made themselves miserable, and pummelled and cud- gelled each other in argument, without being able to settle the point? A house might be built up with the volumes that metaphysicians have written on the subject. Does happiness consist in sensual or mental delights, or is it a state of continual agreeable feeling, or the gratification of some desire which enables us to enjoy the blessings already in our possession ? Let wiser and better heads than ours grow grey and bald in settling the matter. "We have a youth near at hand who will speedily reveal to us how his happiness was brought K 130 PAVED WITH GOLD. about, and of what it was composed. Come here, Philip Merton ! "What's perfect happiness, sir ? " A strong boy's corduroy suit, with a double row of pearl buttons down the breast, and a coat cut like a groom's." Philip is happy and chirping with delight, because his clothes are as sound as the skin of an orange. He walks along, upright with pride, as if he had a family tree at his back to straighten it. A drawer had been unlocked and a little treasure taken out, and Bertha, with a half-sigh, had counted the silver pieces into Philip's hand. He seemed to be abashed at taking the girl's earnings, for, as if his conscience troubled him, he said, " I have no right to take this from you, Bertie, and mother, too, a-wanting it all along." But he closed his fingers on the coin nevertheless. "With his hands in his pockets, he strutted up Tottenham-court- road, delighted with himself as a footman in a new livery. At nearly every step he cast a complacent glance at his clothes, either brushing away any dust that may have fallen on them, or admiring the neat manner in which his trousers fell over his thick highlows. The reflexion of his tout ensemble in the shop windows afforded him singular satisfaction. He seemed to be greatly pleased with his general effect, and took an essential delight in making his nether garments " whistle," as the noise produced by the friction of corduroy is musically styled by the vulgar. In those times the route to Hampstead was very different in ap- pearance from what it is now. The road of Tottenham, which in our day looks like a poor relation of Regent-street, had then no furniture shops to block up the pavement with sofas, chairs, and tables ; neither had American photographists discovered the economic process of taking correct likenesses for sixpence ; nor had Italian pastrycooks hit upon the original notion of giving a wine-glassful of strawberry cream or lemon ice for a penny. Down the Hampstead-road the spirit of commerce had not then converted the gardens before the houses into shops, but every tene- ment had its railed-in patch of gravelly-looking mould and mouldy- looking gravel, where nothing seemed green but the w ee ds, and no plant flourished but the Michaelmas daisy, amid whose luxuriant stems the stray cats of the neighbourhood found excellent sleeping accommodation, curling themselves up in the middle of the rank herb as securely as a slug in a box border. In the hopes of getting a flower for his button-hole, Philip entered several of these unthriving plots, but he only found lilac bushes with twigs as black as crayons and leaves as dusty as a top shelf. When you call back the recollections of your youth, is it not wonderful to think how this big London of ours has grown and stretched itself out within the last few years ? Squares and crescents have crept out like the suckers of a tree, the jagged edges of the town fill up the fields where, in Philip's time, cows were feeding and boys flying their kites. Mother Redcap's had waggons and carriers' carts PAVED WITH GOLD. 131 in front of it instead of yellow omnibuses, and where a row of shops are now built Philip laid himself down in the tall grass and chewed buttercups. It is not far back since the renters of the Augusta and Frederika Villas, the Caroline Lodges, and the Laburnum Cottages, lying at the foot of Haverstock Hill, thought themselves in the country, and would talk of sleeping out of town in the pure air, and boast of the land- scape to be seen from their top windows. But now fierce yellow and red brick houses, with plate-glass windows and stucco cornices, have shot past them to close out the view and mingle their smoke with the breeze. Up the hill they creep, lining each side with a vast number of " The Lindens" without a lime-tree, and " The Elms" without an elm, besides peaceful battle-christened tenements, such as " Blenheim House" and " Trafalgar Hall," whose inmates, quiet souls, have never thought of any war excepting that waged against black-beetles ; and who, whenever thev see a red coat advancing, feel convinced that he has come to make love to the kitchen-maid and sack the larder. On trudged Phil, with his coat on his arm and a holly leaf in his mouth, wishing that the hills were not so steep nor the day so hot and dusty. He passed the then country -looking roadside inn " The Load of Hay," and, thirsty as he was, he felt as if he could have snatched the mug of beer from the drover — who, whilst his flock of sheep were lying panting about the road, was drinking at the bar. To prove the superiority of man over the brute creation, our youth made a point of passing every omnibus upon the roads, leaving them and their three horses to creep up the hills after him ; and he even entered into a spirited competition with a washerwoman's cart, and could have easily distanced the hopping mop-tailed cob, but he felt himself turn- ing to a lobster tint with the heat, and his legs growing stiff as stilts. He never rested unless it was to take a peep over the oak palings and square-clipped hedges that enclosed some of the grounds by the way. The sight of the old Queen Anne mansions, looking as red as a strawberry in the midst of the huge green trees, with their frowning roofs surmounted with a wedding-cake ornament of a belfry, seemed to fascinate him to the spot, and he could not help thinking to himself what a "jolly easy time of it" the young ladies must have whom he saw working at the bow- windows that opened into the lawn. "Ah!" thought Phil, "if I had a house like that, what a first-rate chap I should be all of a sudden ;" and he gazed at the flower-beds piled up with bloom and spotted with colours as a mound of wafers, and he stared at the square paddocks of rippling grass divided by the neatest of iron hurdles, and imagined to himself what delightful fun those same young ladies would have when the hay-making time arrived, romping among the new-mown crop, and how they would enjoy sleeping in its perfume by night. The Belsize estate also met with our young gentleman's warmest approval, and he stood at the iron gates staring down the long avenue of trees that covered in the carriage-drive like a green hood, until somebody came out of the lodge to ask him " what he wanted," and his desires being at that moment of an impossible nature (being, k2 132 PAVED WITH GOLD. indeed, no less than a wish to possess the estate), he did not think fit to enter into any explanation, but moved away. He had reached Downshire Hill before he caught sight of any evi- dence of the donkey business being in a thriving condition. Stand- ing at a garden-gate was a Bath chair, with one of the patient dust- coloured animals harnessed in front of it. The boy was so mucli pleased with this ingenious vehicle for invalids, that he endeavoured to enter into conversation with its owner, informing him that he considered the turn-out to be a kind of young cabriolet before its wheels were properly grown ; but the proprietor, not being in a con- versational mood, gave grunts in reply, and eventually made a remark about the advantage to be gained by some one " stepping it." After Phil had seen an old lady on crutches deposited. inside the chair, where she bore a strong family likeness to the prompter at the Opera, he went on his way again, staring about him with the greatest industry. He even became interested in the welfare of the inha- bitants, and wondered to himself whether Neale, the carrier, who announced that he visited " all parts of London daily," made a pretty good thing of it. At the coach-office he made inquiries as to the whereabouts of Hollyhock Cottage, the residence of Mrs. Sparkler. It was some time before he could get anybody to attend to liim, and the delay afforded him ample opportunities for studying the habits of omnibus drivers. He heard one lady who was seeking for information about the "time of starting," receive the unintelligible reply of " a quarter a'ter, harf a'ter, quarter to, and at ;" he witnessed a dispute between a conductor and his coachman, who was upbraiding him for " never looking about him nor nothen ;" and he heard inquiries made as to " whether Jim had greased that off mare's fetlock," or had " had that bay osse's collar took in a bit." He was told to climb up a steep embankment that stood like a cliff by the roadside, and then turn down long narrow lanes as steep as staircases, and round by stable-yards, where fierce dogs rushed about and barked behind the gates and endeavoured to force their wet noses through impossible openings. He asked everybody he met which way he should go, and it was only after he had turned to the right at least twenty times that he at length arrived at the residence of the Sparkler family. There was a little colony of some dozen cottages, and washing and donkey-letting were the trades the inhabitants lived by. Over •every door hung a board with either " Mangling done here," or " Donkeys for hire ;" and, as if to avoid too great a monotony in re- peating these announcements, every style and size of writing had been employed, though the thin white spider letter on the black ground appeared to be the favourite type. The day being propitious for drying, the gardens and hedges about were covered with linen ; lace collars and nightcaps were spread upon bushes, pocket-hand- kerchiefs and stockings were fastened down with stones on grass- plats, and shirts and petticoats, distended to their utmost tightness by the wind, fluttered from the lines, their proportions looking so PAVED WITH GOLD. 133 terribly unfit for human use, that a notion crossed the mind that all the owners must be in the last stage of dropsy. Mr. Sparkler was evidently a refined man, who, although to the world he might seem to devote himself to the letting out of donkeys, was at heart a florist. His cottage — which was about as large as a hayrick, and had a straw thatch cut close over the windows, like a Methodist's hair — was ornamented in front by a small one-two-three-and-jump garden, intersected with gravel paths not broader than deal boards, which entailed balancing on those who tight-roped its walks. The beds were not larger than mattresses, but no lodging-house couch was ever more crowded. The flowers were packed as closely as nosegays, and how the mould could support such a crop— unless concentrated like portable soup — was a great, unanswerable mystery. Standard roses, with their blooming tops, stood gay as new bonnets perched up in a mil- liner's window ; pansies as large as butterflies, hollyhocks like rosette adorned fishing-rods, and pinks big as shaving-brushes, decorated this essence of a garden. In one corner stood the summer-house, where of an evening Sparkler smoked his pipe ; and even here the consum- mate taste of the man had exhibited itself. Adorning its summit was an arm-crossed statuette of Bonaparte, and china dogs and plaster images decked the roof like a mantelpiece. Philip stood at the gate of this Eden, not daring to pass the palings of butter staves, which shut him out from its delights. He might have doubted if such splendour could belong to any being who supported himself by sixpenny donkey rides, if it had not been for the board over the door, announcing that Tobias Sparkler was in that line of business. • ^^ * - All the Sparkler family were away from home, the care of the house being for the time entrusted to a ginger-edged cur, with a tail that might have been used as a crumb-brush, who went into a paroxysm of barking, and showed all his front teeth in an uncivil manner. This dog was evidently kept as a kind of " knock and ring" to the Sparkler family, and no double rat-tat or bell-pull could have more effectually announced a visitor. Pour stout women issued from a neighbouring cottage to see what the noise was about, and Philip, picking out the one whose hands seemed least like a washerwoman's, instantly addressed her as " Mrs. Sparkler, mum." " So he said you was to talk it over with me," said that lady, after the cause of the visit had been explained. " "What do I know about * boys ?' There's nothen but boys now-a-times ; I never see such a lot of boys. They swarm— literal swarm !" Phil tried to look as if, despite the present glut, there were very few who could come up to him. " "Where the boys spring from," continued Mrs. Sparkler, address- ing her friends, " is more than in me lies to say. If they was im- ported by barrelfuls they couldn't be more abounding. And they come to you as cool as imaginable, and says, ' Do you want a boy ?' . "I had two come to me last Thusday," said one of the washer- women, in corroboration — " both nice boys enough ; but what use is boys to me ?" 134 PAVED WITH GOLD. " Mrs. Millins's boy, too, is out of work," added another lady, " and, as it might be yesterday, she ask me if I wanted a boy. ' What for ?' says I. " "Why can't Sparkler see to his own boys, 'stead of worretting my life with 'em," was the wife's complaint. " One can't sit down to a cup of tea but, before you've raised your saucer to your lips, there's boys must be attended to. They're wuss teasers than flies. Dear me! these boys is wearing me to shreds." She was a stout woman of thirty, in form somewhat resembling a cottage loaf, and Phil felt perfectly convinced that she would last her time, despite her troubles. To try and conciliate her, he ventured to say that if he were engaged, the only reason he should have for living would be to comfort and assist his mistress. " It's too bad of Sparkler to leave everything to me," continued the woman. " It's slaving from first thing when you get up till it's time to go to bed again. Pirst there's saddles to look to, then there's donkeys to be sent out, then there's accounts to keep, and 'undreds of other things." " I don't mind what I do, and I am very fond of gardening, or working anyhow that's useful," said Phil, beginning to enumerate his good qualities. " Then there's seeing that them other boys don't cheat the very eyes out of your head," she grumbled. " I'm sure I wouldn't do anybody out of — no ! not so much as half a farthing, mum," murmured the lad. "Don't tell me, boy!" growled Mrs. Sparkler. "It's like your impudence to say so. All boys is alike. You're human natur', ain't you ? Then hold your tongue." This interview ended in an appeal to the feelings of the women, made by Master Merton in a fit of desperation at the slight prospect he saw of an engagement. He commenced by saying that it was very odd, but people seemed to take an especial pleasure in perse- cuting him, detailing with great excitement and feeling the struggles he had gone through, and w r ound up with a half threat that if his good intentions were this time thwarted he saw no help for earning a living but by leading a most abandoned and vicious existence. "It's hawful to hear him talk," cried one of the washerwomen; " where's your parents, you wicked boy ?" " I am an orphan, and that's what's agin' me," he muttered. " If I'd got some one to help a fellow, do you think I'd be like this ? Ah, I only wish you was orphans, you'd find it out then." They were preparing to answer him, when he broke out again : " It ain't as if I came here without a good word to back me, but Mr. Sparkler knows our people w r ell enough." " "Who's your people ?" asked Mrs. S. "Why, Tomsey's people," he replied, "as takes in their pint of ass's miik regular." Mrs. Sparkler suddenly entered her cottage. She had gone to see if Tomsey's account had been settled. The examination of the memorandum-book was evidently satisfactory, for Philip was told to proceed to the heath, and ask for one Fred Jackson, and announce PAVED WITH GOLD. 135 to him that for the future he was to be employed among the long- eared stud. Fred Jackson, or, as his companions called him, Swinging Fred, was a tall, gipsy-looking fellow, with a sunburnt face and a couple of black ringlets hanging down each cheek. He w r as celebrated among donkey- drivers both for the length of his locks and the ad- mirable manner in which he managed the steeds, for, whilst he could tie his curls under his chin, he, on the other hand, was so clever with his stick, that, with one blow struck somewhere under the ear, he could most surely bring any rebellious animal to the ground. Dressed in his dirty flannel-jacket and leaning over a saddle, he did not look such a terrible fellow ; but the donkeys knew him well enough, and even when he coughed up went the ears, as if they were on their guard against the strong-armed foe. The first thing Swinging Fred did was to make the new boy pay his footing, which he fixed at sixpence, for a pot (his drink was ale, with gin in it, of which he could swallow immense quantities), and the next Was to roar out, " Sam Curt" in so loud a voice that all the donkeys on the heath heard him and grew restless. "Here, Sam Curt! "Where is yer ?" " Gone to Frognell Eise"— •" No he ain't"—" Why I see him there a minute since" — * Got a job to the Spaniards," shouted so many at once, that replies seemed to come from all quarters. Eventually, a lad came shuffling up, who turned out to be the same Curt who was in such great demand. " Been touting on the hill, Fred 7 " he said, in a frightened voice. "And who telled you to do it ? — What do you do it for, then?" growled the Swinger. " I'll break every bone in your skin, you young rat." And Sam looked frightened, and all the donkeys that had been lying down rose up very rapidly and fidgeted about. Phil thought to himself, " He's a nice sort of a master to have to spend your days with." " Here, take that young 'un along with you," said Swinging Fred, pointing to Merton, " and put him up to what he's got to do. Do you hear ? — then do it." Theie wasn't much work on hand for the first week or so that Phil was at Hampstead, and he had plenty of time to study the details of the business. His greatest delight was to lie down on the grass, or sit on the chains that keep the flag-post steady, and look at the landscape. The broad heath stretched out before him, covered with dots of furze-bushes that seemed to freckle the ground like a country- man's sunburnt face. What a glorious fringe of trees surrounds this London's playground ! If it were not for the lamp-posts in the road beyond, who could imagine so lovely a spot was so near to the monster city. Sometimes the lad would wonder w T ho lived in the grand houses on the skirts of the heath. They lie concealed in the verdure of their surrounding trees, as if, after having crept up so close to the public ground, they were afraid of being sent back again, and had hidden 136 PAYED WITH GOLD. themselves from sight. The round, tall chesnut-trees were in bloom, with their white pagodas of flowers standing up at the tips of the "boughs like candles on a Christmas-tree. Philip could, from where he lay stretched on the turf, see into the gardens belonging to some of these mansions and catch sight of the fruit-trees in the orchards, big mounds of blossom with all the ground about them speckled with the falling bloom, as if a thousand love-letters had been torn into small pieces and thrown there. Sometimes a donkey, enjoying himself in the distance, would begin to bray, and then other donkeys scattered about would answer as cocks do, and eventually, after the music had been taken up in all corners of the heath, the whole body of those on the top would join in chorus, and throw out their music with deafening effect. On one side of the heath — the West-end side — there is an avenue of old elms, where the young ladies' schools walk up and down, treading among the sundrops that have fallen through the leaves and made golden rings on the ground, and it was our boy's delight to sit down on one of the benches and listen to these little scholars chatting with their French governess. " What on earth," he would think to himself, " does she mean by saying, after looking at me, * Eegard, mam'selle, ce sal petit garsong-la,' " If ever these little ladies extended their promenade into the heath itself, he fol- lowed the petticoated regiment as it appeared and disappeared among the risings and hollows of the ground, and wondered in his mind whether Bertha would ever have such nice clothes as they wore, and be able to talk about the " Sal garsong-la" as they had done. How lovely did the distance too appear, with its purple bloom of haze over it. The tree-tops, rolling round and round like smoke, looked as soft and pouting as a cushion; the fields, veined with hedges, dividing off the little bright-coloured patches of ground as irregularly as the glass in a stained cathedral window. The only sounds to be heard were the cawing of rooks and the birds singing in the trees around, unless some burst of distant laughter attracted the eye to the little specks romping together among the far-off furze- bushes. That lake of water seen like a stain miles away over the tree- tops, was, Phil knew, the Eeservoir at Kingsbury, and Harrow on the Hill stood out plainly against the white clouds on the horizon, whilst, by looking between the chimney of yonder big white house and the poplar near it, he could see a smudge of background which was Windsor Round-tower. Eound the pond with the rusty iron pipe sticking up in it are ranged the donkey-gigs and one-horse flys, and further on are clustered together the saddled asses, all with their heads together, as if they were whispering like jurymen considering their verdict. How those gigs can " pay" we never could imagine. They are curious, shattered- looking turn-outs, as clumsily put together as a schoolboy's paste- board model — overgrown children's carts, with wheels not larger than a wheelbarrow's, and lined with limp chintz, or patched with worn-out japanned cloth that had once formed part of a table-cover. The donkeys that pull them are all pot-bellied, and have under their PAYED WITH GOLD. 137 round, drooping stomachs a fringe of hair so long that the wind blows it about. The poor brutes, with their loug ears lopping down, look like big rabbits. Nor are the one-horse fiys much better than the gigs, for their linings all look tumbled, as if they had been slept in, and the big gaunt steeds have long heads, with a drooping, sulky-looking under-lip. One has been fired in the fetlock, and the bulging flesh is scored like a melon with the scars. Another — a white horse with, a black nose and a dirty draggle tail, stuck together at the tips — is blind of both eyes, and his ribs ripple up the carcase, each one as distinct as the folds of an accordian. Aided by his friend Sam Curt — or Snorting Sam, as he was called from an unfortunate habit of breathing loudly — Philip soon got to know every donkey on the heath as perfectly as a shepherd distin- guishes every sheep in his flock. The stud of donkeys then exposed for hire by the ten oy eleven proprietors who "worked" Hampstead, formed a most various and eccentric collection, for they were of all ages and colour, some so small that Swinging Fred could straddle them like a colossus, and others so large, that, with their bulging saddles on, they might almost have passed for stunted camels. Their harness was neither first nor second-rate, but of the lowest possible rate, fastened together by string instead of buckles, with the leathern tongues sticking out in every direction. The greater number of the animals were so thin that the backbone stood up almost like the keel of a boat. To pre- vent any rubbing from the saddle, pieces of drugget or sacking, and even whisps of hay, were tucked as a pad under the seat, so that, everything considered, the poor brutes had an untidy, sluttish ap- pearance, as if they had dressed themselves with the hurry of a maid- of-all-work at a lodging-house. Perhaps those destined for the espe- cial service of ladies were the most remarkable for a slovenly neglige, their costume being something after the grandeur of a circus palfrey, with a slight mixture of the Eoman toga, for over the wide-seated saddles were placed linen coverings, decorated with red braid edgings, which, when clean and not too much torn, no doubt had a very smart appearance. These " ladies' donkeys" were also distinguished by being nearly cut in two by the girths, which were pulled up so tightly that their waists seemed to rival in smallness the formation of the frog — a species of tight-lacing which did not improve the appearance of the long-eared quadrupeds. Poor, ill-used creatures ! the worst-fated of all hard-working servants ; who, because they are patient, have to suffer more blows than the most vicious and ill-disposed of earthly four-legged blessings. It puzzles one, after watching these donkeys for some time, to tell whether their resignation proceeds from philosophy or stupidity. A stick rattles down on their flank, and the only re- monstrance made is that the rope's-end of a tail is tucked in tighter than before, and the animal, as if it knew the Christian creed, apparently chides its oppressor on Church principles, for, after re- ceiving a blow on one side, it presents the other to the enemy to receive the balancing thwack. Your intelligent horse throws out his legs and kicks ; your sensible dog bites if he can, or growls and 138 PAYED WITH GOLD. shows his teeth ; hut the poor ass, awakened from its sleep by a smart blow across the loin, takes no more notice of the insult than if a leaf had fallen on him. "Whenever Sam Curt took the new boy among the donkeys for the purposes of instruction, it was his practice to direct the attention of his pupil to any particular animal worthy of his notice, by flicking it adroitly on the part which he considered to be the tenderest^of the body. " There, that's a nice 'un," said the youth, pointing to one of the brutes with the insides of its ears as full of hair as a lady's slipper; " we calls her Everlasting Teakettle. Get up you there, Everlasting Teakettle ! Mothers of fam'lies and nusses allers ask for her of a morning. They're very fond of her, 'cos she carries two;" and he pointed to a child's swing of a chair, which was strapped to Everlast- ing Teakettle's back. " Where's the one you call the winner of the Derby ?" asked Phil. " We've got such a lot of 'em," answered Sam. " They've all been winners, only every year we changes 'em. Now this little chap as is at present called Lady Snuffers, has been Eclipse, and the winner of the Two Thousand Guinea Stakes, and Elying Dutchman, and ever so many more. He's as fat as a little pig and get his own living — don't want nothing to eat of us. Here's Crab-apple Betsy, too," he con- tinued, advancing a few paces ; " she has been the winner of the Oaks and the Chester Cup, and a heap of others. She's so gentle, you can a'most do anything with her." And to prove his words he adminis- tered a smart cut with his whip, which made poor Crab-apple Betsy hop vigorously. She took it gently enough. A big donkey, with rough, curling hair, whose hind legs had been clipped to allow the stick to have a better effect, attracted Phil's notice. "He is a beauty if you like," cried Snorting Sam, leaning against it. "He's Elm-tree J e, and the quickest that ever runs. Just you see." And he set to work beating the clipped portion of the animal's body, whilst in a guttural voice he growled out, " Go along with yer, Joe," so that the brute, finding that serious work was intended, darted off at a full gallop, the boy following and trailing his stick in the road to make a noise. It was astonishing to hear how well Master Curt was acquainted with the good qualities of the different donkeys he patronised with his notice, and yet surprising to witness the cruelty with which he ac- companied his praise. He passed a row of them, standing as quietly as if they had been toys on a shelf, but he could not refrain from rousing them out of their sleep with his knocks. " Come up, there, Crazy Jane ! — hi ! hi ! you White Alice ! — stir up, you Old One Eye — I'll give you something, you Bobtail— now then, you old Dook of Brunswick." The hollow sound of the stick on the ribs made the mass move un- easily, and run together like a drove of sheep. " That's such a one as you don't see often," said Snorting Sam, stopping before a donkey with a vicious eye, shaped like the slit in a PAVED WITH GOLD. 139 violin. It had a thick mop of fur on its forehead, which afforded Master Curt a firm grip whilst he said, " Every hair in its 'ead is worth pounds, and all over alike. You might go one thousand miles and not meet with such a one-er as this here Ingia-rubbia is. Stir up, there, old Ingia-rubbia. It can do a' most every think but speak," added the driver, lashing at its ears as if he was trying to cut them off like tall weeds, and certainly one of the things that India-rubb8r could do, was to kick, and very near to Snorting Samuel too. It happened that some of the asses, being, perhaps, soured with life, and rendered quarrelsome by persecution, began to fight and bite each other. Like a hawk darting at a hedge-sparrow, Snorting Curt dashed into the midst of the fray, and laid about him vigorously, shouting to the music of his blows, " Hulloa, you Prince o' Wales ! — would you, Laura Smith !— what are you about there, Bonny Black Bess ? — I'm after you, Lady Milk- maid — and you too, Gentleman Jerry !" When the battle had ended and quiet was restored, Sam, in answer to the question as to which was the best donkey of the lot, thus de- livered his opinion : " We calls Hearts of Gold the pride of the world, 'cos she's the fastest, and biggest, and prettiest — a piebald, very handsome, and a 'Curiosity, which is in her favour, which was offered four pound for. But I'd as soon have Lightheart. You'll say why ? Well, for this here : I fancies him more, and he'd go till he bustes hisself." After a pause, he added : " But, after all, what's donkeys to ponies for fastness ? Mr. Lam- fret, him as owns the white and roan ponies, he wouldn't take a ten- pound note for either of them. There they stand with their nose- bags on, and one of them's got eyes as blue as plums. Only the worst of ponies is this : a gentleman says I want a half-crown ride, and off he goes for a hour and don't come back again, and the next thing we hears of is, that the pony is in the pound or at the green-yard, and they come down on you for ten bob." The duty assigned to Phil was that of touting for custom, Mr. Sparkler considering that the newness of the boy's clothes should be duly taken advantage of, as an evidence of the respectable manner in which he conducted his business. The instructions given to the lad were to take up his stand by the Coach and Horses public-house, and, whenever he saw anybody coming, to rush up to them, and, no matter what their age or size might be, to ask them perseveringly, " Do you want a nice saddle- donkey ?" With an honest enthusiasm Phil carried out these instructions to the quick, and in a few days he became the terror of every old lady in the neighbourhood ; indeed, many most respectable persons have as- serted that "he did it on purpose." " Do you want a nice donkey, mum ?" he would half confidentially ask of these aged matrons ; and when they turned round to say " No, my boy ; how ridiculous !" he would add, " Nice comfortable soft saddle, mum, uncommon easy!" 140 PAVED WITH GOLD. " Go about your "business, sir," would be the reply. Then Phil would walk by their side, whispering, "Have a nice cheer, mum, or a nice easy shay, mum ?" " No, no, no, I tell you !" " Got so very nice saddle-ponies, mum — carry you like a feather !" # Then the elderly matrons lost all patience, and they stood still and looked about them for a policeman, as they muttered between their gums, " I'll give you in charge, you bad boy ! How dare you ask me to ride on a pony ?" When giving Philip his instructions, Mr. Sparkler had laid down this important axiom : " Say everything's nice — nice donkeys, nice saddles, nice shays, nice everything. It's time enough for them to find out if the things is nasty after they've paid their money." Philip didn't enjoy this " touting " much, for he was longing to have his share of the fun on the heath ; and every night, when Sam Curt related to him the adventures of the day, he would inveigh bitterly against old Sparkler for "keeping a fellow sticking down in the beastly village." No doubt to Phil the town of Hampstead did seem a melancholy place enough. There wasn't a shop he cared to look into, for even at the library they never changed the prints exposed for sale. He hated those chemists' shops with the small greenhouse windows, where pickles, sauces, and cigars were vended as well as medicine ; and he looked with contempt upon the draper's establishment, where hats, shirts, boots, and cotton prints were exposed for sale in a com- partment scarcely larger than a one-horse stall. The boy said it was like being in a country town a thousand miles from town. The farrier's shop opened on to the road, and the tea-dealer, the butcher, and the tailor all announced that they were from London in so pomp- ous a manner, it was impossible to fancy you were only five miles away from it. It does indeed seem like some old-fashioned town. In some parts of the road there are high embankments, with -tall elms, in which the rooks have built, leaning over the highway as if they were top-heavy from their round, full branches. All the place is so silent that the livery-stable cocks at one end of the street crow out and defy those crowing at the greengrocer's at the other extremity of the town. The only excitement the place knows is when some travelling circus pitches its tent on the heath, or when some horse, coming down the steep hill, grows frightened with the pressure of the vehicle, and runs away, in which case the carriage and its contents are — at the sudden turning of the road — sure to dash into the coffee-house next the Black Boy and Still, smashing the windows and scattering the customers. If you cross the road and seek out West-end-square, you will find it the most rustic-looking place, with a tree growing in the centre of the pavement, whilst the houses have a William and Mary look about them, being built of red brick, with heavy white casements, as clumsily made as the stage-coach windows of old, and over the street doors are old-fashioned carved porticos. They don't make such stout leaden water-pipes now-a-days as those against these houses, neither do we PAVED WITH GOLD. 141 forge such iron lamp -holders and gates, with twisting watch-spring curls, and scrolls and foliage. It was near this square that Philip lived, down a court by the side of a rag-shop, kept by the mother of Eedpole Jack, another of Sparkler's boys. (Mrs. Burt gave the best price for white linen rags, and a high price for kitchen fat, and the full value for* copper and brass, besides letting out lodgings at threepence a night.) Slowly but surely did Philip advance to the highest honours that can befal a donkey- driver. His first promotion was being allowed to drive a chaise, which conveyed four ladies to the foot of Haverstock- hill. Next, he was entrusted with the care of those donkeys which were hired for children, and so well did he behave himself on these occasions, that eventually he was raised to the dignity of accompany- ing young ladies in a delicate state of health. The tenderness with which he checked all desire to trot on the part of the animals soon gained for him a name among the invalids of Mask- walk and the Vale of Health. Still this was not what Philip longed for. He wanted to join in the exciting chase of following up some twenty young damsels galloping along the road, and it was only when his grumbling was slightly tinged with the abusive that Mr. Sparkler yielded to his entreaties. The night before this great advancement took place, the following conversation was held between Redpole Jack and our young friend. They had gone into the churchyard, not for serious contemplation, but because the graves afforded a comfortable seat. And with an immense yew-tree spreading out like a wing above them, the converse began. " Shall I tell you why Sparkler wouldn't let you come on the 'eath?" asked Jack. "Why, because you're so well clothed, and those new things of yours gets him a name for having respectable boys. "Why, there's nothing pays so well as sick people, and they won't have any driver but is decent-looking." " "Well, I shall be up there to-morrow, so I don't mind," answered Phil. " And a nice messing you'd a' made of it, if I hadn't seen you first," continued the Redpole. " Now, look here ! S'pose you was a driving old One-eye, and you wanted Jiim to gallop, what would be your little game ?" " Why, shout at him, and hit him as hard as I could — give him with all my might "a good feed of ' long oats' and ' ash beans,' " an- swered Phil. This made Mr. Jack Burt sneer with disgust. " O' coorse you would," he said. " I knowed it. That's like you and your proudness, thinking you know everything. And what would you get ? Why, old One-eye would stand still and kick at you. I had my hand swolled dreadful through him." " What should you do ?" asked Phil. " Now you're coming to it," answered Master Burt. " Why, first of all I should give him three or four over his 'ead to let him know who I was." 142 PAVED WITH GOLD. ""Well," asked Phil, " and after that, when he did know who you was ?» ""Why, then I'd give him two or three sharp 'uns on the top o' the hock to show him who Tie was." " Go on/' said Phil—" what then ?" " Why, then he'd git one o' my lefthanders, as should knock him on one side, and another as should knock him back again, and send him hopping for two or three yards." " And what's the end of it ?" asked Phil. " Well, for the minute," added the lecturer, " old One-eye would'nt know whether he was afoot or a-horseback, but off he'd go, regular spanking, first rate." Philip's reply to his instructor consisted in reading from one of the tombstones near him the following epitaph : At morn in cheerful health he rose, At noon and eve the same, At night, retir'd to calm repose, The awful summons came. CHAPTER VIII. ON THE HEATH. It was a hot day, with so fierce a sun that every cab and cart that passed along the road by the heath drove through the pond on the top to freshen the horses. The gnats were flying about the donkey's ears, and they — poor brutes — were most of them lying down on the sandy ground, sleeping till their time of torment arrived. But though it was three o'clock, and broughams had already driven up to " Jack Straw's Castle," and dinners had been ordered, yet no donkey riders appeared. All the proprietors were in a dreadful state of excitement at the prospect of so bad a day's work, and the men in flannel jackets, with their whips and sticks under their arms, were spread out along the road, watching like skirmishers for any one advancing. " I never saw anything like it," cried Mr. Sparkler, unloosing, in despair, the girths of some of his stud. " Eine weather seems thrown away on some people. They deserves to be drownded in rain." " Bad doings ! bad work !" answered Mrs. Suttey, a proprietress of six animals ; " we shan't get a little loaf to-day, much less a big one ;" and, addressing her assistant, she added, " you'll have to go without your meat to-day, Bill." Another of the owners remarked, mournfully, " Sorry I ain't seen my mare gallop to-day, Tobias." " I've only had two out this morning," said Mr. Sparkler. " Old PAVED WITH GOLD. 143 Milkmaid and Maria Punch is gone over to Highgate, but that won't pay rent." Whilst they were lamenting their want of customers, a governess, with two young ladies by her side, threw the whole of the flannel jacketed crew into confusion by making signals expressive of a desire to take asinine exercise. It instantly became a tussel as to who should have the job, or, to use the words of the boys themselves, " it was a regular scrummage for the gals." Before the imprudent fair ones had advanced ten paces on to the sward, they beheld some twenty men and some fifty donkeys rushing at full speed towards them. "Hi! hi! hi!" roared the drivers, urging on the galloping squa- dron before them. " Here you are, mum ! here's Lady Snuffers, the best as ever wore a bridle," cried one. "Little Everlasting Teakettle, miss, the pride of Hampstead," shouted another. " Gentleman Jerry, ladies, a real blood donkey," roard a third. Dreadfully frightened by the terrible position they were in, feeling themselves being gradually suffocated by the long-eared herd, with a black-nosed donkey pushing its nose into the ribs on one side, and another animal, with a cold in his head, rubbing against the mantilla on the other, the three forlorn damsels allowed themselves to be lifted off the ground by the first that dared to lay hands on them, and before they had even time to scream they were seated in their saddles and being led away. Then abuse from the disappointed fell in a volley on their devoted bonnets. " Tou ought to be ashamed of yourself, you wicked old woman," howled one at the governess, " making fools of hard-working people." " You deserve to be chucked off, you young cat," snarled another at one of the young ladies. "If I was a gal I'd give you something should do you more good than riding," growled a third. And away the poor things were carried, the imaginary pleasure of the ride entirely dispelled by the idea that they had unconsciously done some dreadful act of injustice to the Hampstead donkey keepers. " That's a queer way of doing business," said Phil to Snorting Sam. " "Wait till Whit-Monday, and you'll see worse rigs than them," answered Master Curt. One night, as Mr. Sparkler was enjoying his pipe in his summer- house, and smoking the spiders into a restless condition, his wife called out to him, " I forgot to tell you, Tobias, there's a job for to-morrow night. The same party as had the pic-nic by moonlight last year called to- day about hiring some donkeys for another jollification." " Do you mean that lot o' servants as stopped out all night on the 144 PAVED WITH GOLD. Heath ? Oh, they're going on the loose again, are they ?" And after laughing, he added, " And when does the spree come off?" " To-morrow ;"and they wants the loan of a kettle, and three nice donkeys for the gals to ride when so inclined. It was Mr. Boxer, the footman from Tomsey, that came about it, and he says there'll be a good dozen of 'em." "To think of that, now !" exclaimed Mr. S. " It appears their families is out of town," continued the woman, " so they can manage it without being the slightest uncommodated. Teddy Cuttler, Captain Crosier's groom, is to be one of the party, and he's thought a deal of. They've got fiddles and all a coming." On the following evening, just as the shades of night were stealing over the Heath, a cab drew up in the road near the pond, and a stout male form, fashionably attired in pumps and Berlin gloves, stepped from the interior, and gazed anxiously down the road. On the roof of that cab there was a hamper, and on the box beside the driver there were paper parcels with grease showing through. After the gentleman had peered about in every direction, he re- turned to the vehicle, and, addressing a lady inside, said, " Nothing wisible of them yet, "Wortey; but where's the hurry?" " I know'd that Mary h'Anne of ours would be late," answered the so-called "Wortey ; " she's always such a time cleaning herself, and figging up with her gewgaws and fallals." The gentleman seemed inclined to bear the delay with patience. He strutted up and down, cleaning his nails, and humming airs known only to himself; and whenever the voice in the cab inquired, " Do you see them yet, Boxer ?" he answered, in the most cheerful of voices, "Not yet, Wortey." At length a group of ladies and gentlemen were seen creeping up the hill, and instantly Mr. Boxer became excited, and commenced waving his pocket-handkerchief with the utmost gallantry. Some of the young damsels, seeing the signal, ran laughing to- wards the cab, the full skirts of their light dresses swinging in the wind as they scampered along. " "What a uncommon fine-growed gal that Susannah is," observed Mr. Boxer. " She's a remarkable showy dresser to be sure." " Then she's been at missus's drawers again," snarled Mrs. "Wortey. "When the cab was surrounded, the introductions, reproaches, and excuses began. " Here we are, "Wortey, dear," cried Mary Anne. " This is Fanny from No. 12, and here's Susannah and Caroline from No. 16." " "What on h' earth's kept you so long, Mary h'Anne ?" answered the surly Mrs. "Wortey. " If you'd been dressing for a h' evening party you couldn't have been more time." " It was that horrid shoemaker never sent Susannah's high-'eeled home ; and she is such a fiddle," playfully observed the fair accused. "Oh! how can you, Mary Anne," cried Susannah. "It was all along of her a doing out her ringlets, and then cleaning her white kid gloves with Indey-rubber." PAVED WITH GOLD. 145 " Have you brought the shrimps ?" asked Mrs. Wortey, in a half whisper, "and the cowcumber? — there's a good girl. Where' ve you put 'em ? Oh, in your pocket. Mind you don't get sitting on them, there's a dear, for they're not worth a thank'ee if they're scruntched." Every one in the party was dressed with such scrupulous cleanli- ness that the stiffness of the linen seemed to impart a corresponding rigidity to the behaviour. The coachman from No. 27, with his face firmly fixed in his unbending shirt-collar, seemed to have lost the use of his neck. Indeed, Mrs. Wortey, observing that when he wished to turn his head round his body moved also, inquired of Mary Anne if the man " had a carbuncle on his nape — or what ?" Tou might have mistaken the gentlemen for noblemen's sons, for their boots creaked when they walked, and their hats were shiney. In the bow of their satin ties some had stuck double breast-pins, whilst a big brooch ornamented the centre plait of Mr. Boxer's shirt-front. Whenever they stood still, it was with an imposing attitude, the hand either resting on the hip, or being thrust into the coat-tail. The ladies, in their light starched dresses and black silk mantillas, looked divinely aerial. Those who had on shoes and open-worked stockings, coquettishly raised their skirts to allow their feet to be seen. With the hair done in ringlets — with the parasol firmly grasped in one white-gloved hand, whilst the other held the pocket-handker- chief ready to relieve the warm countenance — those who beheld these damsels must have imagined them to be so many duchesses of the land. When Mr. Sparkler first saw the company, he mistook them for a wedding-party that had dressed overnight so as not to be late in the morning. Even the cabman was dazzled by the gorgeous display of raiment ; and though Mr. Boxer paid less than his fare, yet the imperious manner in which that gentleman answered his grumblings, by saying, " I live in 'Arley-street, No. 23, and if you don't like it, summons me," completely awed the vulgar fellow into respect. The place fixed upon for holding the pic-nic was at the lower extremity of the Heath, and, the gentlemen carrying the hampers, they all adjourned there. Now came the delights of the evening. Shawls were spread over the furze-bushes, so as to form tents, and some dry wood having been collected, a fire was lighted to boil the kettle and supply hot water for tea and grog. The unpacking of the hampers was witnessed by all with great in- terest. Nothing had been broken but a bottle of gin, which had given rather an intoxicating flavour to the veal and ham pie. "Now who on earth brought this here bit of cold lamb?" asked Mrs. Wortey in disgust, as she drew forth the remainder of a shoulder. " Hush !" whispered Mary Anne. " It was Caroline ; and she says she's very sorry, but it was the only thing in their larder, so she made up with a pot of pickles, some lump sugar, and half a.bottle of ginger 146 PAVED WITH GOLD. " And don't No. 36 keep their butcher ? Couldn't she order some- thing, I should like to know," murmured the cook ? " I've no patience with such timidity. If we could run the risk for a veal and 'am pie, what was to prevent her." Mr. Sparkler and the donkeys, on one of which Phil was mounted, were received with a cheer of delight from the entire party, and, flat- tered by their reception, they in return rendered every possible assist- ance in spreading the cloth and arranging the glasses. The moment Phil saw Mrs. Wortey and Mary Anne, he recognised them. "Why, there's the cook from where Bertha lives," he thought to himself; " and blessed if that ain't the girl and the man too." But as they did not remember his face, he was but too glad to es- cape detection. Whilst they were "eating, no behaviour could, for elegance or gen- tility, have surpassed that which dignified the actions and conversation of these picnicers. " Allow me the honour of a glass of ale with you, Mrs. Wortey, ma'am ?" asked Teddy Cutler. " Please pass the stone jug, Mr. Boxer. Your good 'ealth, ma'am, and prosperity ekal to my best wishes ma'am." "Try another bit of this custard-pudding, my dear," said Mr. Boxer, looking skittishly towards Miss Caroline ; " it won't hurt you, my gal, and the dancing will shake it down. What ! haven't got room for it ! Well, I'm glad you've eat hearty." Healths were even proposed, Mr. Boxer speaking in the highest terms of Mrs. Wortey, and saying, " It was an honour to live in the same establishment with her, for her behaviour was, he might and would say, at once conciliating, virtuous, and complesarnt." : But the health which Miss Mary Anne undertook to give met with the greatest success. It would seem that Bertha Hazlewood was not a favourite with Miss Tomsey's domestics, for when Mary Anne, after sarcastically stating that she was about to speak of " one whom they h'all adored," added, " need I mention that my allushun is to Miss Bertha;" her speech was received with shouts of laughter, in the midst of which Mrs. Wortey was heard distinctly to say, " Drat the stuck up minx, I'd Bertha her out of the house if I had my way." Philip was so startled at this singular incident, that — by mere acci- dent — he let fall a glass of ale right over Miss Mary Anne's bonnet, an act for which he was pursued some considerable distance by the en- raged Teddy Cuttler, and narrowly escaped a severe drubbing. Nothing could persuade Mr. Boxer to join in the dances that sub- sequently took place. He had eaten so much, dear man, that he pre- ferred lying down with his head resting on Mrs. Wortey's lap ; and in this position he quietly smoked his pickwick, whilst she, kind soul, plied him with hot gin-and-water, lifting the liquid by spoonfuls to his sipping lips. The moon was up, and shining brightly, and from under their shawl-covered resting-place they could hear the music of the vigorous violins, and see their companions stepping it like fashionable fairies on the green sward*. 1 ^ PAVED WITH GOLD. 147 " That Caroline's a sweet dancer," murmured Boxer ; " and for a hupper housemaid, her foot and ankle are above her station. I've seen many a worse stepping into a carriage." " It haught to be a nice one," answered the spiteful Wortey, " for there's enough of it ; but if you call that a leg — I don't — posts is their right name. Hopinions differ, Boxer, and I know what a leg is as well as any woman who has one." " That there Eanny, from ~No. 12," continued the gay unabashed Boxer, "is a well-formed gal, but I'm afraid she pulls her figure in a bit, and her hands is uncommon hot and rough." " Lord, do ha' done, Boxer," again remonstrated Mrs. "Wortey, hitting him on the nose with the spoon. " If you was the Grand Serag of Turkey himself, you couldn't be more after the girls." But Boxer heeded her not. " What a luptious eye that gal Susannah have !" he muttered, in an exhausted tone. " But her nose for a woman's is perposterious, and at meals she's a gluttonous feeder." The indignant Mrs. Wortey made no reply to this, but suddenly rose from her seat and allowed the head of Boxer to fall with a dull sound on the ground. It took him a quarter of an hour before he could pacify the outraged lady and coax her to rest him once more in her lap, and ladle gin-and-water into his mouth. As it grew late — after many dances, when the fiddlers were tired, and the donkeys had been galloped to death — the whole party assem- bled in a circle to partake of further refreshment, and Bertha being the person they most disliked, they once more commenced to talk of her. " What Miss Tomsey can see in her," cried Mary Anne, " a super- cilious highflown squit, with her 'please do this,' and ' be so kind do that' — oh, it's most comicable." "And, after all, who is she ?" added Mrs. Wortey. " Is her pre- tensions beyond her humble spear ? Has she any fortune ? I never in my life see such a small box as she brought. Has she any birth ? I myself hear her call a common beggar-boy ' her brother !' " " I'm sure she has no beauty," added Mary Anne, with a sneer. " If you was to take away her hair and mouth, she'd be a nice object, poor thing." " But there's some persons, perhaps, thinks she's a perfect Weners de Medciny," slyly remarked Mr. Cuttler. "La !" cried all the young ladies, " you do not mean to say that you " " Thin gals is not my choice," answered Mr. Cuttler, looking fondly at the plump Mary Anne by his side. " If I liked, I could tell some- thing that would make you all laugh fit to burst your laces." " Oh, do now, won't you ?" shouted the ladies in chorus ; and some of the party thought they heard the donkey boy call out, " Oh, do," like the rest of them. But, on looking round, they found that Phil was fast asleep. " Well, you're very hard on me, but I must give way," fascinatingly replied Mr. Cuttler. " One day, Captain Merton Crosier— my young chap — was a standing at our window, and talking to Mr. Tattenham l2 148 PAVED WITH GOLD. and another gent, the Hon. Chanticleer Sutton by name— friends of ours— and they see your Bertha. They was down on her in a minute." " You don't say so !" cried the ladies. "Ah, they was, though. The captain says, 'Tat, I must look after my neighbours a little ;' and, says Mr. Sutton, ' She's as nice a little toddles as ever I see.' " " And what then ?" they asked. 3 Well, I left the room then, you see," replied Mr. Cuttler ; " but he's always at the window looking over your way, and if you keep a spy on her, there'll be some fun." In such pleasant sport did the night pass, and by the time the grey morn showed in the east everybody was thoroughly tired out. The plump Boxer, fuddled with gin-and-water, was carried on a donkey to the nearest cab-stand, his head reclining on the shoulder of the compassionate Wortey, who walked by his side, whilst ever and anon he in gratitude tried to look up in her face, as he murmured forth ff Dear cookey." Susannah and the coachman from No. 27 ; Fanny and the young man at the baker's; Mary Anne and Teddy Cuttler, all sauntered across the fields in the direction of town, their personal appearance bearing strong testimony of their having been out all night. The next day, when the twelve o'clock postman called at Miss Tomsey's with a letter, he had to knock three times, and eventually the parlour-window was opened, and the epistle was taken in by a pair of tongs, at the end of which was a plump arm with a red elbow, a limb much resembling one to this day in the possession of Mrs. Wortey. CHAPTER IX. EVERY MAN HAS HIS FANCY. In one of the back streets near the Haymarket, there existed, in the days whereof we write, a small, humble-looking public- house, well known to all sporting gents and members of the prize-ring, for its proprietor was no less a person than the celebrated Alf Cox, the champion of the "light weights." So long as England is a sporting nation, the name of Cox must be remembered with admiration, as belonging to one of the most gentlemanly boxers in the profession. Those who had the pleasure of being present on the occasion when he fought and beat Ned Box, have never failed to declare that he was the prettiest sparrer ever out, and that when he sent one of his right- handers " home," it was the severest punishment ever witnessed. The renowned Alf Cox had been prudent enough to retire from the ring and all " active sporting life" while he was in the height of PAVED WITH GOLD. 149 his fame, and now he devoted the entire of his attentions to his public-house, exerting all his " strenuous endeavours to please," and holding out innumerable inducements to attract lovers of the fancy- to his tavern, for, like the rest of the world, Alf Cox's fondest desire of his heart was to make his fortune. The entertainments given at the " Jolly Trainer" were of the most varied description. On Monday evenings there was a galaxy of sport in the shape of sparring, at which such glories of the pugi- listic world as the Clapham Smasher and the Hackney Crasher as- sisted. The great match between the Southwark Pounder and Tripey Paggits was got up at his house, and the men showed there publicly the night before the battle It was well known to his friends that Alf Cox was a great advocate for reviving " Old times" — indeed, his circular says as much. He would, too, in his printed cards invite the lovers of song to meet their " social brethren" at his house, on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, and on such occasions that public favourite Mr. Thomas Timms presided, assisted by a host of talented friends. These musical treats were, as Alf Cox said, " open to all, he ever catering," the only return expected from the visitors being, that they would drink as rapidly and as largely as they could. To make use of the noble lines printed in large type over the bills wafered up in the tavern-window, the especial mission that Alf Cox had marked out for himself was the Eeunion of old Friends and the Fancy generally ; Harmony ! Conviviality ! ! and Good-fellow- ship ! ! ! — Refreshments moderate, and of the best quality. A favourite hobby with Alf Cox was the improvement of the breed of dogs, and he was reckoned among the dealers to be as good a judge of what a dog was, or ought to be, as any man in the metro- polis. Moreover, he was the founder and chairman of the West-end Spaniel, Terrier, small Bulldog, Bull-Terrier, and Toy-dog Club, and a meeting of the members was held every A¥ednesday in his public parlour, when any other fancier was also invited to attend and ex- hibit. On such occasions the glass circulated merrily, and the waiter w r as ever in the room to receive the gentlemen's orders, whilst the most interesting discussions were held as to the excellence of this terrier's strain, or the points in that bull's build. But of sports, that for which Alf Cox was more especially re- nowned was his public ratting, which came off every Tuesday evening at his "public hostelrie." He said that the reason why he gave away silver snuffboxes as prizes, " to be killed for by novice dogs of any weight," was because he was determined to encourage the useful and good sport of destroying that destructive vermin the rat ; but we fancy lie must have had some other motive, for such excessive devotion to the public welfare would, in the end, have entailed certain ruin ; and no publican, however enthusiastic, could have afforded to indulge in such expensive antipathies. Mr. Alf Cox had caused two hundred handbills to be printed and distributed amongst his friends and patrons, and they caused the greatest excitement among all earnest supporters of the fancy. In these handbills he announced that a "great hundred rat match" was 150 PAVED WITH GOLD. to come off, and all the grocers, barbers, and tailors in the neighbour- hood were already discussing the chances the different dogs had of winning the silver collar that was to be "killed for." This great match, too, was, according to the handbill, by " distinguished desire," and many were the pots of beer emptied at the bar of " The Jolly Trainer," in the hopes of discovering who was to be the patron of the evening. " It's no good asking me, Mr. Noakes," replied Mrs. Cox to her constant customer, the cab proprietor ; " but I'll tell you this much, Viscount Ascot and Lord Oakes are as fond of sport as any man I ever see of their weight and size." "When the important evening arrived, the open space before the long bar of " The Jolly Trainer" was, long before the performances were to take place, crowded with customers, who were all drinking, smoking, and talking about the match. Most of them had brought dogs w T ith them, so that a kind of canine exhibition was going on. Some carried under their arm small bulldogs, whose flat, pink noses rubbed against the arm as you passed; others had skye-terriers, curled up into balls of hair, and sleeping like children, as they were nursed by their owners. The only animals that seemed awake, and under continual excitement, were the little brown English terriers, who, despite the dandy brass-ringed leather collars by which they were held, struggled to get loose, as if they smelt the rats in the room above, and were impatient to begin biting their foes. There was a business-like look about this tavern which at once let you into the character of the person who owned it. In establishing it, the drinking seemed to have been only a secondary notion, for it was without any of those adornments which are generally considered so necessary to render a public-house attractive. The ceiling was low and bulging, and the flies had speckled it into a granite colour, whilst the tubs in which the spirits were kept were as dirty as water-butts, and blistered with the heat of the gas — even the once gilt-hoops had turned black as shoe-ribbon. Sleeping on an old hall-chair reclined an enormous white bulldog, " a great beauty," as many of the drinkers observed, with a head as round and smooth as a clenched boxing-glove, and seemingly too large for the body. Its forehead seemed to protrude in a manner significant of water on the brain, and almost overhung the small nose, from which it breathed heavily. It was a white dog, with a sore look, from its being pecu- liarly pink about the eyes, nose, and, indeed, at all the edges of its body. On the other side of the bar was a bull-terrier dog, with a black patch over the eye, which gave him rather a disreputable look. This gentleman was watching the movements of the customers in front, and, occasionally, when the entrance-door swung back, would give a growl of inquiry as to what the fresh-comer wanted. Mr. Alf Cox was kind enough to inform a particular friend of his, who was patting the fork-like ribs of the brute, that he considered there had been a little of the greyhound in some of his back generations. As the hour advanced, the visitors arrived in such numbers, that Mrs. Cox, finding that her appeals to the gentlemen not to block up PAVED WITH GOLD. 151 the bar were of no use, was obliged to get her husband to address the multitude in a neat speech. " My good friends," he cried, mounting a chair, "there's as nice and comfortable a parlour as ever was used, if you'd only step that way. Though I'm fond of seeing handsome faces about me, yet I'm too busy now for such enjoyment." Then did the laughing crowd make for the green-baize door of the parlour, headed by a waiter shoutiug out, " Give your orders, gentle- men!" Like all other parts of this establishment, no pains had been taken to render this parlour attractive to the customers, for, beyond the sport- ing pictures hung against the dingy paper, it was devoid of all adorn- ment. Over the fireplace were square pigeon-hole boxes, containing the stuffed heads of dogs famous in their day. Pre-eminent among the prints was that representing that wonder among rat-killing dogs, Mr. Cox's Tiny, five pounds and a half in weight, " as he appeared killing two hundred rats." " He was the 'andsomest little thing as ever entered a pit," Mr. Alf would say, "and in honour of his performance — which is un- ekalled in annals— I had that engraving printed on white silk, which you see before you. Poor Tiny ! they don't make 'em like him now. He wore my missus's gold bracelet as a collar, such was his propor- tions." Among the stuffed heads was one of a white bulldog, with tre- mendous glass eyes sticking out as if it had died of strangulation. Young Mr. Cox — Alf's eldest — was kind enough, whenever he saw any stranger examining the canine mausoleum, to offer up a tribute to the memory of the departed favourites. " They've spoilt her in stuffing — made her so short in the head — but she was the greatest beauty of her day. There w r asn't a dog in England as dared look her in the face. There's her daughter," he would add, pointing to another head, something like that of a seal, " but she wasn't reckoned half as handsome as her mother, though very few could show agin her, especially for form. That is a dog," he would continue, directing his finger to one represented with a rat in its mouth — " that was the best in England, though it was so small a quart pot might be its kennel. I've seen her kill a dozen rats almost as big as herself, though they killed her at last, for sewer rats are dreadful for giving a dog canker in the mouth, however much you may rinse the mouth out with peppermint-and- water." The company assembled consisted of sporting men, or those who, from curiosity, had come to witness what a rat-match was like. Seated at the same table were, talking together, those dressed in the costermonger's suit of corduroy, soldiers with their uniforms carelessly unbuttoned, coachmen in their livery, and tradesmen who had slipped on their evening frock-coats, and run out from the shop to see the sport. . The room seemed full of dogs. They were standing on the different tables, or tied to the legs of chairs, or crouching under forms, or sleeping in their owners' arms. Each animal in its turn was minutely la PAYED WITH GOLD. criticised, the limbs being stretched out as if feeling for fractures, and their mouths looked into as if a dentist were examining their teeth. Nearly all .the dogs were marked with scars from bites. " Pity to bring him up to rat-killing," said one who had been admiring a fierce- looking bull-terrier ; and although he did not indicate what line in life the brute ought to pursue, still everybody understood that " fighting " was the occupation referred to. Mr. Cox had taken " the chair," and installed himself as head man of the meeting. " Now, gentlemen," he cried, after he had lighted his pipe, " give your minds up to drinking. Do just as you would at home, and get drunk as soon as you like." The laughter which followed this neat address set all the dogs barking. "Silence, dogs! order, little dogs!" shouted Mr. Alf; "I'm ashamed of you !" After a time he asked, " Has anybody got a Skye pup he's tired of?" "Don't believe him," answered one of the men; "he's only a kidding of us. If you says you have, he'll tell you to go and eat it for your supper or somethink." Mr. Alf Cox, far from feeling displeased at this attack upon his character, began to titter, and merely said, " Well, you are a good 'un for a tale, uncommon." "I say, Alf, when are you going to begin?" asked somebody in the room. " I'm only waiting, my dear friend, for these here swells. Can't be long now." And, ringing the bell, he made inquiries of his first- born, which ended by Mr. Cox suddenly vacating the chair ; for, as he told the company, with a wink, " his distinguished patronage was in the bar-parlour, and his missus making love to them." In the dingy little back-parlour, which was the ex-prize-fighter's sanctum, sat the noble patrons of the ratting-match. They hatl come there more out of curiosity than any love of the sport ; indeed, it was Captain Merton Crosier who had tempted them to witness the per- formance. There was Yiscount Ascot lolling on the horsehair sofa, smoking a cigar as big as a desk ruler, and watching Mrs. Cox, who was preparing some brandy- and-water for his cousin, Lord Oaks. They had brought with them a French officer (he had lately arrived in England with letters of introduction to Captain Merton Crosier, in which le Colonel Victor Baudin Eattaplan, du ll e L6ger, was spoken of as one of the braves of Algeria), and at that moment the foreigner and the captain were engaged in a discussion on dogs, to which Fred Tattenham, Tom Oxendon, and the Hon. Chanticleer Sutton — the remainder of the distinguished patronage — were listen- ing with considerable delight. The colonel, who spoke English almost fluently, had related an anecdote of a friend of his who had endeavoured to give a fashionable appearance to his " bouledog Anglais " by having it shaved like a poodle. The sports of the evening were naturally enough made to await the PAVED WITH GOLD. 153 leisure of such noble guests. It was in vaiu that the company in the parlour stamped on the floor and rang the bell. Even when Jack Pike, the celebrated rat-catcher, was sent to the bar to make inquiries, it did not advance matters, for the ambassador, being re- cognised by Captain Merton Crosier, was instantly had into the room, and ordered to assist Alf Cox in emptying a quart pot of champagne, as well as to amuse the noble company by some of his vermin-destroy- ing experiences. Before such honourable society Alf Cox put on his best behaviour. He saw in a moment that the " cap'en" was only asking him ques- tions that he might show off before his friends. When Jack Pike was seated, the conversation was taken up at the point where it had been interrupted. ""Well, cap'en," said Alf, in answer to a question put by that gallant officer, " I should think I buy in the course of the year, on an average, from three hundred to seven hundred rats a week. I've had as many as two thousand rats in this very house — ah, that I have ! — at one time. Eat a sack of barley meal a week they would." "I suppose they fight each other like fury?" suggested the captain. " Well, my esteemed friend, if I didn't feed 'em they'd get uncom- mon ill-behaved," answered Mr. Cox. "They'll eat each other like rabbits — so vicious is their propensities — for I've watched 'em ; and when they've done devouring their companions, they turns the dead 'uns' skins inside out as neat as purses, and polish the flesh off beautiful clean." " Where the devil do you get them from ?" asked the Honourable Chanticleer Sutton. " Get them from, my good friend? It's a regular trade, bless you," cried Mr. Cox. " I should think I have twenty farmmerlies depend- ing on me, and I suppose I have hundreds of thousands of rats sent me in iron cages fitted into baskets. They don't make a bad thing of it neither. I paid a man five guineas only yesterday for thirty-five dozen, at threepence ahead. Catching them is dangerous work, take my word for it." " Do you mean the bites?" nervously suggested Viscount Ascot. " You see, my esteemed friends, there's a wonderful deal of dif- ference in the specie of rat," explained the landlord. " The bite of the sewer and water-ditch rat is, I can assure you, very nasty, for they live on filth. Now Mr. Barn rat is a plump fellow, and live on the best of everythink, and he ain't so poisonous. Sewer rats is shocking for dogs." " You may say that, and for men too," cried Jack Pike. " I was once, gentlemen, bit on the muscle of the arm, and I shall never for- get it if I live twenty thousand year. It turned me queer all of a sudden, and made me feel upheaving, and there I was kept in bed for two months, and my arm swole, and went as heavy as a ton weight pretty well." " Curse 'em, it's true," cried Captain Merton Crosier, looking at Lord Oaks, who was beginning to feel uncomfortable, lest any acci- 154 PAVED WITH GOLD. dent should happen to him during the match. " What dithguthting beaths," lisped his lordship. " Oh, I've been bit by 'em hundreds o' times," continued Jack Pike ; " it's a three-cornered bite, like a leech's, only deeper, of course, for it goes right to the bone, just as if you had been stuck with a pen- knife. And the quantity of blood that comes away, dear ! dear ! The best thing I ever found for a bite was the bottoms of a porter-cask as a poultice." "It's all gammon," exclaimed Tom Oxendon. " I've seen fellows handle them as coolly as possible." " Ay, and I've handled many a hundred," said Jack Pike, calmly ; "but they don't bite the less for all that. Look here, and here," he added, showing some scars on his hands. " Bight through this thumb- nail, too, yet Alf Cox has seen me handle 'em, hav'n't you, Alf?" " That I have, my noble friends," replied the landlord, " and much do I admire your nerve, Jack. "Why, I've seen him put rats inside his shirt next his bosom, and into his coat, and breeches-pockets, and on his shoulder — in fact, anywhere. He let 'em run up his arm while he was stroking their backs and playing with 'em. Would you like to see him do it, my esteemed friends ?" " No, hang it, not here. Make a fellow sick," cried the patrons ; on which le Colonel Eattaplan, seeing that there was a fair oppor- tunity for showing off, pretended to be much grieved at the timidity of his companion, and said something about un brave not being alarmed by une pauvre bete. " The most dreadfullest, spitefullest rat I know of is the snake- headed rat, as we calls it, gents," observed Jack Pike, who, during the silence, had been taking a long pull at the champagne-pot. " So it is, my friend, a very ugly customer," said Mr. Alf Cox, in corroboration. " They are what we calls the blood rat, gentlemen," continued Jack ; " and I give you my word, I've known 'em attack children asleep in their cot, and gnaw their little hands and feet." " How could you tell that rats did it ?" asked Viscount Ascot. " Because, your honour," he replied, " I traced the blood which their tails had trailed through the openings in the lath and plaster. Ah, what two pretty little children them was — uncommon handsome. Whenever they see me now, they says, ' Oh, here's Eatty, ma !' ' : " I can't sthand thith any longer," said Lord Oaks. " Itth enough to make you ill." And, despite the assertions of le Colonel Victor Baudin Eattaplan that it "woss meare shild's play talk," the whole body of the patrons rose from their seats, and whilst Mr. Cox returned to the parlour to make his peace with the crowd, the " distinguished desire" was con- ducted to the room above, where the pit had been erected for the purposes of the match. To avoid all reproaches, Mr. Cox, as he entered, cried out, as if addressing somebody, " Let me know directly the shutters is closed in the room above, and the pit lighted up." This announcement seemed to raise the spirits of the impatient assembly, and even the PAYED WITH GOLD. 155 dogs tied to the legs of the tables ran out to the length of their leathern thongs, and their tails curled like eels, as if they under- stood the meaning of the words. But although pacified, the customers were surly at the delay. So the cunning Mr. Cox had to win their esteem once more, by noticing their dogs. "Why, that's the little champion," said he, patting a bull-terrier, with thighs like a grasshopper, whose mouth opened back to its ears. " Well, it is a beauty ! I wish I could gammon you to take a fiver for it." Then, looking round the room, he added : " Well, gentlemen, I'm glad to see you do look so com- fortable." At last word was brought that all was ready, and instantly a rush was made to the door, which caused dogs to yell and growl, and men to swear and curse. In a few moments all the customers were mounting the broad wooden staircase, which led to what was once the drawing-rooms, and having dropped their shillings into the hand of the doorkeeper, entered the rat-killing apartment. What was called the pit looked like a small circus, some six feet in diameter, about as large as a centre flower-bed, with strong wooden sides, reaching to elbew height. Over it the branches of a gas-lamp were arranged, which lit up the white painted floor and every part of the little arena. On one side was a recess in the room, which the proprietor calls his "private box," and this apartment the noble patrons had taken possession of, whilst the audience clambered into convenient places upon the tables and forms, or hung over the sides of the pit. All the little dogs which the visitors had brought up with them, the moment they saw the pit, began to squeal and bark, struggling in their masters' arms as if they were tho- roughly acquainted with the programme of the evening's sport ; and when a rusty wire cage of rats, filled with the grey moving mass, was brought forward, the noise of the dogs was so great that Mr. Cox was obliged to shout out, " Now, you that have dogs, do make 'em shut up, or take 'em out of the room." The captain was the first to jump into the pit. A man wanted to sell him a bull-terrier, spotted like a fancy rabbit, and a dozen rats was the consequent order. The captain, to show off before his friends, insisted upon pulling the rats out of the cage himself, laying hold of them by their tails and jerking them into the arena. He was cautioned by Mr. Cox, with great tenderness of manner, to desist, lest any of the brutes should bite him, for, " Believe me," were the words, " you'll never forget it ; these here rats are none of the cleanest." Whilst the rats were being counted out, those that had been jerked into the arena innocently amused themselves by sniffing about the white-painted floor, little knowing the fate that awaited them. Sometimes one of the poor doomed brutes would cause great merriment by running up the captain's trousers, making that gallant officer shake his leg vigorously as he exclaimed, " Gret out, you var- mint !" Miserable little wretches! some of them were even sitting on their hind paws cleaning their faces. 156 PAVED WITH GOLD. "When the dog that was to massacre this dozen was brought into the room and saw the rats, he grew excited, and stretched himself out straight in his owner's arms like a Gothic water-spout, whilst all the other animals in the apartment burst into a full chorus of whining. " Chuck him in," cried the captain ; and over went the dog, and in a second the rats were running round the circus, or trying to hide themselves between the small openings in the sideboards. Although Mr. Alf Cox, who was very intimate with the owner of the spotted terrier, endeavoured to speak up for the dog, by declaring " it was a good 'un, and a very pretty performer," still it was evi- dently not much worth in a rat-killing sense. If it had not been for his " backer," as the youth who accompanied the terrier into the arena was called — if this boy had not beaten the sides of the pit with his hand, and shouted "Hi! hi! at 'em !" in a most bewildering manner, it was very doubtful if the terrier would not, as far as he was concerned, have preferred leaving his antagonists to themselves to enjoy their lives. Some of the rats, when he advanced towards them, sprang up like balls in his face, making him draw back with astonishment. Others, as he bit them, curled round in his mouth and fastened on his nose, so that he had to carry them as a cat does its kittens. It also required many shouts of "Drop it — dead 'un," before he would leave those he had killed. We have never been able to ascertain from Captain Merton Crosier whether he eventually bought the dog ; but from its owner's saying, in a kind of apologising tone, " Why, he never saw a rat before in all his life," we fancy no dealings took place. The captain seemed very anxious to afford his friends as much sport as he could before the grand match came off, for he frequently asked those who carried dogs in their arms whether " his little 'un would kill," and seemed angry when such answers were given as " His mouth's a little out of order," or " I've only tried him at very small 'uns." "Here, let my young 'un have a sniff at the dead 'uns," said a coachman, who had a rough-haired little terrier under his arm. As soon as the animal was in the pit, it seized hold of a carcase almost as big as itself, shaking it furiously, till it thumped the floor like beating a tambourine. A shout of laughter burst from the audience, and Alf Cox, looking at the coachman, said patronisingly, " I say, Mews, he's a good 'un at heads and tails, ain't he ?" Preparations now began for the grand match of the evening. The bodies of the rats slaughtered in the last match were gathered up by their tails like so many candles, and flung into a corner. The arena was swept clean, and a boy sent down stairs with orders to tell Tom to bring up " that basket which had the rats picked for the match — the one that came from Enfield ditches." During this delay in the performance, the following dialogue took place between Viscount Ascot and Ered Tattenham. "Who the devil's that French fellow?" asked the nobleman, nodding with his head in the direction of le Colonel Victor Baudin Eattaplan, du 11° Leger. PAVED WITH GOLD. 157 " I don't know," answered Tattenham ; u he's a friend of Crosier's. I never saw him before." u Hang me if I like the fellow's face at all. It has a kind of hang- dog look about it. Don't you think so ?" "It strikes me I'ye seen him before, but I don't know where," re- plied Fred Tattenham. " He speaks English very well for a French- man. Didn't you hear him saying, ' Gk> it, you cripple ?' That doesn't sound as if it was his first visit to England, does it ?" "I don't like him at all," continued the Viscount. " Has Merton spoken about him ?" " Why, Crosier's as much puzzled as we are," was the reply. "I'm told he brought excellent introductions with him, and, what is : stranger than all, he seems to have known a good deal about Merton' s v family affairs — at least so he told me." This conversation was put an end to by the entrance of men carry- ing a big flat basket, like those in which chickens are brought to market, but it had a wire work top, under which were moving mounds of closely-packed rats. An attempt was made among the lookers-on to do a little betting, but nobody seeming inclined to " make a book," the pugilistic land- lord cried out that, for the sake of sport, he would make a wager, and straightway offered to lay his eldest son a bottle of lemonade on the match, stipulating, however, that he should have first drink ; and he added, "As your mother says you take after me in a' most every- thing, you shall take after me in lemonade. Tou won't drownd in what I leave, I can tell you." Of all the sights of the evening, the one which most seemed to astonish the noble patrons was the daring manner in w^hich Mr. Alf Cox's first-born introduced his hand into the basket of rats, some- times keeping it there for more than a minute at a time as he fumbled about and stirred up with his fingers the living mass, picking out, as he had been requested, " only the big 'uns." When the one hundred animals had been flung into the pit, they gathered themselves together into a mound, which reached one-third up the sides, and reminded one of the heap of hair-sweepings in a barber's shop after a heavy day's cutting. They w r ere all sewer and water-ditch rats, and the smell that rose from them resembled in offensiveness that from a hot drain. Captain Merton Crosier was immensely excited by these prepara- tions. He amused himself by flicking at the rats with his scented pocket-handkerchief. For the fun of the thing, he offered the little brutes the lighted end of his cigar, which they ran up to and tamely sniffed at, and then convulsed the company by the droll manner in which they drew back after singeing their noses. It was also a favourite amusement of the captain — who was allowed to do anything he chose — to blow on the grey pyramid of rats, and so much did they dislike the cold wind, that it completely broke up their gatherings, and sent them fluttering about like so many feathers ; indeed, whilst the match was going on, whenever the little animals collected together and formed a round mass, into which the dog dare not force its nose, 158 PAYED WITH GOLD. the cry of "Blow on 'em ! blow on 'em !" was given by the specta- tors, and the dog's backer puffed at the rats as vigorously as if he were extinguishing a fire, and away they darted like so many sparks. The company was kept waiting so long for the match to begin that the impatient captain at last threatened to leave the house, and was only quieted by the proprietor's reply of " My dear friend, be easy, the lad's on the stairs with the dog." True enough, a noise of wheezing and screaming was heard in the passage without, as if some strong- winded animal were being strangled, and presently a boy entered, carrying in his arms a bull-terrier in a perfect fit of excitement, foaming at the mouth, and stretching its neck forward, so that the collar which held it back seemed to be cut- ting its throat in two. It was nearly mad with rage, scratching and struggling to get loose. " Lay hold a little closer up to the head, or he'll turn round and nip yer," cried Alf Cox, in tenderness, to his son. "Whilst the gasping dog was* fastened up in a corner to writhe its impatience away, inquiries were made for a stop-watch, and also for an umpire to decide, as it was comically observed by Mr. Cox, " whether the rats were dead or alive when they're killed, as Paddy says." When all the arrangements had been made, the second and the dog jumped into the pit, and after allowing the terrier to " see 'em a bit," he was let loose. The moment he was free, he became quiet, and in a most business- like manner rushed at the rats, burying his nose in the mound of fur, snapping and snuffling until he brought out one in his mouth. In a short time a dozen rats, [with necks wetted by the terrier's mouth, were lying bleeding on the floor, and the white paint of the pit became grained with blood, as if hens had been scratching about on a wet red flooring, or a painter had been imitating some crimson- veined wood. Everything was proceeding very pleasantly for the dog, when a rat, more bold than the rest, fastened on to its nose, and, despite his tossing, still held on dangling there. In vain the terrier dashed the pendant rat against the sides, for, though it left a patch of blood, as if a strawberry had been stuck there, still it clung to the snout. " He doesn't squeal, that's one good thing, but he looks rare and silly over it," said one of the lookers-on. " He's lost forty-two seconds by that ornament on his snout," cried the timekeeper, when this brave rat had at last been shaken off and killed. When any of the hundred fell on their sides after a bite, they were collected together in the centre, where they lay quivering in their death-gasps. "Hi, Butcher! hi, Butcher!" shouted the second. "Good dog! Hurr-r-r-r-h !" and he beat the sides of the pit, like a drum, till the dog flew about with new life. " Dead 'un — drop it !" he howled, when the terrier" nosed" a rat kicking on the floor, as it slowly expired of its broken back. ^ J I s y PAVED WITH GOLD. 159 When four out of the eight minutes allowed for the match had expired, " Time !" was called out, and the dog was seized by the backer, and forced to repose itself. Panting, as if it bad been running miles, with its neck stretcbed out like a serpent's, it remained staring intently at the wounded rats which crawled about the floor. The poor little wretches that had as yet escaped, as if forgetting their danger now their enemy was held back, again commenced cleaning themselves, some nibbling the ends of their tails, others hopping about, going close up to the legs of the lad in the pit, smell- ing at his trousers, or advancing, sniffing, to within a few paces of their executioner, the dog. The conduct of le Colonel Victor Baudin Eattaplan du 11° Leger was, whilst this match was going on, in the highest degree remarkable. "With every rat the dog killed he seemed to grow more and more ex- cited, beating the pit sides with the backer, and laughing louder than any one in the room. Strange to say, too, he suddenly began to speak English with almost a pure accent ; indeed, if he had been born in the metropolis itself, the pronunciation could not have been much better or clearer. " Good dog ! at 'em ! pitch into 'em ! hi, hi ! bite their d — d heads off! hah! hah! hah!" cried le Colonel Victor Baudin Eatta- plan, urging on the terrier. Even Mr. Cox was startled by the Frenchman's sudden improve- ment, for he urbanely remarked to him : " Very good, mounseer — you tree hong. Learn very well here, good lesson — see kill rat." And, turning to his other noble patrons, he added : " You must bring the mounseer here again, my esteemed friends, and by — — , after three ratting matches, he'll speak -like a Member of Parliament." The French officer, who at first had seemed slightly agitated by Mr. Alf Cox's remarks, soon recovered himself, and, indeed, joined with great good-humour in the laugh which had been raised against him. " Qu'il est drole ce Corx," he remarked to Viscount Ascot ; but the nobleman either paid no attention to the observation, or else was rather deaf. During the pause which now took place in the proceedings, the gentlemen were again requested by the landlord to " give their minds up to drinking." " You know the love I have for everybody here, and that I don't care a cus for any of you," jocosely remarked Alf Cox, though there was more truth in the observation than many fancied. "Any other gentleman like to have N a few rats ?" asked the first- born, whilst he was gathering up the halfpence which had been thrown into the pit as a reward for his exertions in backing the dog. " Let's have a dozen," cried a man, who spoke as if he had been struggling to resist the temptation, but could not. Another batch of rats and another bull-terrier were thrown into the pit. This dog did his work so well — cracking the necks of the rats like so many 160 PAYED WITH GOLD. walnuts— that the admiration of the spectators was focussed upon him. "Ah," said the owner, " he'd do better at a hundred than twelve, I know ;" whilst another, hanging over the pit, observed, " Eat killing's his little game, I can see ;" and Mr. Cox himself, in his ad- miration, cried out, " She's a very pretty performer, and though not my own dog, and no ways interested, I'd back her to kill against any- body's at eight and a half, or nine." It was nearly twelve o'clock when the noble patrons rose to depart. There were a good many persons on the staircase as they went down, and a little pushing took place, despite all that Mr. Cox could do to prevent his esteemed friends being in any way annoyed. They parted outside the door, the Viscount and Fred Tattenham going one way, and the remainder of the party directing their steps towards the Hay market, it being their intention to treat le Colonel Victor Baudin Battaplan to a night on town. "When Viscount Ascot reached his club, he found, on searching for his purse to pay the cab, that his money was gone. "It's a good haul, too, for the fellow that's got it," he said, "for there were thirty odd pounds in it, and I never bother myself about the numbers of notes. It's a nuisance to lose so much though, isn't it ? There was a blank unsigned cheque in one of the pockets, but that doesn't matter so much." " I'd give notice to the Bank about it, all the same," suggested Fred Tattenham. " It might be filled up for you." ' As they were going up the steps the Viscount stopped suddenly, and taking hold of his companion's arm, said, earnestly, " Do you know, I half suspect that French colonel of the robbery. I can't be certain, on account of the pushing on the stairs, but I remember he kept very close to me as we came down." "Confound him!" replied Tattenham. "I have my suspicions too." What these ended in, remains to be told. PAVED WITH GOLD. 161 CHAPTEE X, FRIENDS ARRIVE. One day, whilst the boys were waiting for a turn to go out with a job, Mr. Sparkler, casting his eye over the heath, saw a young woman, whom he instantly recognised as the maid- servant from Madame de Blanchard's establishment for young ladies, advancing in the direc- tion of the donkey-stands. Being a thoroughly business man, and knowing that such orders were generally very excellent and exten- sive, Mr. Sparkler did not think it beneath his dignity to play the part of touter, but hurried forward to meet the young woman with a rapidity which showed that he was rather nervous lest anybody else should snatch the chance from him. The reason of Mr. Sparkler's sudden departure was soon discovered by his brother proprietors, and as they were all well acquainted with the girl from the school, a pang of jealousy passed through all their hearts, and the quiet of the heath was disturbed by angry voices. In the heat of the moment, masters began to strike their boys for not being on the look-out, and boys to squeal and abuse their masters for taking the law into their own hands. All Mr. Sparkler's movements were watched with the greatest interest. He was seen to touch his hat with great politeness to the girl, and it was concluded, from his respectful demeanour, that the expense of a first-rate job formed the subject of conversation. " It's a good thirty donkeys at least," cried one owner, shaking his whip at his boy, who had retired to a safe distance. It was in vain that preparations were set on foot to try and cut the ground from under Mr. Sparkler, for the herd of animals hurried off towards the servant had scarcely been roused into a trot, before Mr. Sparkler was seen returning, his countenance so beaming with inward satisfaction, that the four-legged deputation was ordered back again, it being evident that every arrangement had been con- cluded, and the job secured. The Hampstead donkey-masters, although they will fight amongst themselves for a sixpenny ride, and seem influenced by feelings of the deepest hatred when any business is on foot, are, nevertheless, an amiable and accommodating race of men, assisting each other on half-profits with the greatest cheerfulness w r hen an order of any magnitude has to be executed. Hence, when Mr. Sparkler rejoined his friends with the announcement that eighteen donkeys were wanted at the ladies' school by one o'clock, he found no difficulty in securing long-eared steeds to that number. " Here, you Phil, you'll have to be one to go along with this lot," said Mr. Sparkler, beginning his preparations ; " and mind old Indy 162 PAVED WITH GOLD. Rubber is for the governess, for she's a mortal fine woman, and takes a deal of carrying, so the gal telled me," For at least half an hour every hand in Mr. Sparkler's employ- ment was hard at work, tidying up and arranging saddles, so as to make the cavalcade look as respectable as possible. The patronage of the ladies' schools in the neighbourhood was very much sought after, for although the prices given were not high, still the orders were extensive, and came at a time in the day when business was ex- tremely slack. All the time that Mr. Sparkler was adorning his steeds, by hiding the ends of straps, stuffing straw under the saddles, or arranging the linen covering so as to hide, as much as possible, the faulty condition of his harness, he continued giving his directions to Phil. "Put one o' the young 'uns on Laura Smith," he said, "she's very tender on the back ; and keep your eye on Bobtail, or he'll be up to kicking, and breaking some of their necks, if he have a chance. And, Phil, mind you be particular civil to the girls' missus, and don't let's hear of your being up to your larks, getting any of the young 'uns chucked off. You'd better let old One Eye go alongside of Crazy- Jane, or she'll be a lying down in the road, or some other wicious- ness." And as he spoke of the bad-hearted One Eye, he tapped her smartly on the shoulder with his stick, to show that he disapproved of her general behaviour. " Mind, too, Phil," he continued, " they're only out for two hours, and don't you go running their legs off, and knocking them up for their afternoon's work." Eighteen handsome donkeys, accompanied by five sluiced and combed boys, drew up, as the clock struck one, before the iron gates of Madame de Blanchard's establishment. The effect was very im- posing, and everybody who passed stopped to admire the gaily attired stud, and to glance at the windows, where the young ladies, with their bonnets on, were impatiently peeping over the blinds, and gazing wistfully on the donkeys. The establishment gained great glory that day, and many were the praises uttered about the great affection Madame felt for her pupils, and her motherly treatment of them. Presently the doors of the academy opened, and out marched the young damsels, trying, by screwing up their little lips to the size of cherries, to look as serious as they could in the presence of their gover- ness, but every part of the face was laughing except the mouth. These attempts at solemnity were nearly choking some of the little misses, and making their faces as pink as rose-leaves. All the young ladies were dressed in their best clothes, and looked very prim and pretty, with their smooth hair so neatly dressed and tucked behind the ears that it seemed a sad pity to derange it with galloping. Their little collars and cuffs, too, were so brilliantly white it was sorrowful to think how soon the dust would soil them. As they stood in the front garden — the prettiest flowers there, be it understood — the governess said there was a great deal too much chattering ; and we are sorry to have to relate that a little pushing and quarrelling occurred whilst the young ladies were being placed in their saddles. One Miss Wagbird — a terrible, wicked girl, as the mistress called her — was ordered to write out " Do not push !" one PAYED WITH GOLD. 163 hundred times, in play hours, for disorderly conduct. Then one Miss Clara Marsh had to be severely reprimanded, and threatened with being sent back, for taking a violent prejudice against the Duke of Brunswick, whom she declared to be a dusty thing, with a sore on its back. Another young lady — Miss Twining, who wore her hair down her back, and had dimples under her eyes — was rated for her affectation in pretending to be nervous when Sam Curt was helping her on to the saddle ; and, worse than all, she showed some temper, asserting that she couldn't help it, for it tickled. Yet the governess preferred believing Master Curt's explanation of "It's her skin's so creepy, ma'am. It itches in a moment." The governess — a fine, tall, thin woman, but inclined to wither — ■ endeavoured to govern the young ladies in a half-military fashion, calling out their names in succession when it came to their turn to mount. There was a great deal of confusion caused by some of the little misses putting the wrong foot in the stirrup, and a great deal of time was wasted in fidgeting about in the saddle to get comfortable, and in altering straps which were either too long or too short. If the mistress had not been a woman of great nerve she would never have been able to preserve order among her pupils. Cries of " Adone, Mary!" or, " Let me alone, Tilda!" evinced the unsettled condition of some of the scholars' minds. Others would grumble because their donkey was the worst of the lot, or because its knees were broken ; and one even took a strong prejudice against her steed because sbe said its eyes were full of flies. " Miss Smith, I'm ashamed of you ! "What are" you about, Miss Collis ? Pull the other rein directly — where are you going to ? Ar- range your dress, for goodness' sake, Miss Trelaw T ny ; and take your parasol out of that donkey's ear, Miss Simpson." There was one young lady — she could not have been older than fourteen — who caused more disturbance than all the school put toge- ther. Somehow or other, whenever Philip was about to lift her on the saddle, the donkey was sure to hop out of the way ; and as all the other young ladies laughed, it certainly did appear as if it was no accident. " Kick that patient animal again, Miss Crosier, and you shall be sent back," at last called out the governess. What made the pupil's conduct look very black indeed was, that the very next attempt after this threat the young damsel was jumped on to the back with as little trouble as a circus -rider. "When the cavalcade was mounted, the governess, with much dig- nity, took her seat on India Eubber ; and whilst she was doing so, it was painful to hear the tittering which crackled among the pupils. She must have heard it, poor lady, for she blushed a deep cinnamon colour. Philip could not take his eyes off this Miss Crosier, for he had re- cognised in her the little girl who one day, when he was seated under the avenue by the heath side, had called him " ce sal pettit garsong- la." He did not know what the words meant, but he had a half- notion that they were slightly complimentary, and had been spoken in pity. Once he asked Swinging Fred what " ce sal pettit garsong- M 2 164 PAVED WITH GOLD. la" meant, but Mr. Jackson, being unacquainted with the French language, had replied that he could not "tumble to it," and that it was a " regular jawbreaker." So, as he was unable to obtain a trans- lation, Phil contented himself with his own notions on the subject, and felt convinced that the little lady was commiseratiug with his forlorn lot, and very thankful he felt for her sympathy. She had a wicked, pretty little face, that would have made any body like her. It is very difficult to say whether her eyes left off laughing even when she was asleep, and how she ever managed to close them, with all those lashes about the lid, must be guessed at. She had the strange power, too, of working her eyebrows about, as a horse does its ears ; and if a fly happened to settle on her forehead, or her hair got out of its place, she would frown like the Saracen's Head on Ludgate-hill, though the next moment the semicircles were back on her forehead again, and very lovely to look at. The last time she returned home from the holidays her mamma wrote a letter to Madame de Blanchard requesting that Helen might never be permitted to go out in the sun without some covering to protect her skin ; and nobody who has seen the pretty child could object to such a precau- tion, for her complexion is so clear that you can see the blue veins on her temples as distinctly as if she had traced them with cobalt, and even now there are some half-dozen golden spangles of freckles, where the sun has caught her, on the top of her little nose, where the skin is extremely delicate and sparkles like a lily-leaf. The cavalcade moved along so slowly that this Miss Crosier did nothing but grumble at the pace, and ask Emma Twining, who was next her, " When that old thing" — meaning, we are sorry to say, the governess — " was going to let them gallop ?" She was evidently a very rebellious young damsel, and far from settled in her mind. "Whenever the mistress called out, " Throw your shoulders back, Miss Crosier, you're stooping dreadfully," the wicked child, far from feeling grateful for the kind reproof, as we should, only shook herself, and pouted, and her eyebrows moved about so rapidly with frowning, that it seemed as if they would never become round again. The cavalcade was going along very prettily, all the pupils holding themselves delightfully upright, and looking very solemn and lady- like, with the mistress in the rear, keeping a strict eye over them to see that there was no talking whilst they were passing through the town. But what did Miss Crosier care for the governess ? She was determined not to hold her tongue for anybody, but would speak as much as she liked, and to whom she liked. Now, Emma Twining was a much better-behaved young lady, and when the insurrectionary Helen whispered any question, the only reply she received was, " Don't— she's looking," or, "Don't — she'll hear us," or some such nervous repulse. So Helen called Emma " a disagreeable thing," and determined, as there was nobody else to chat with, she would talk to the donkey-boy, Phil. But first of all, with a cunning far beyond her years, she warned the lad not to look at her when he answered her questions, but to keep his head straight in front of him, so that the mistress might suspect nothing. PAYED WITH GOLD. 165 " What's your name, boy ?" she asked. " Philip Merton, miss," was the reply. On hearing this she gave a laugh, which made the governess call out, " Pray be more steady, Miss Crosier !" but she didn't seem to attend in the slightest degree to the warning, but continued the conversation. " Merton !" she said, in an astonished tone ; " la ! what a curious thing ! my brother's name is Merton. I wonder if you're a rela- tion ?" and as she felt she must laugh, she pushed her bonnet-strings into her mouth. After a moment, she added: "Where do your parents live, boy?" " My mother's dead — the heavens be ber bed !" was the sad reply. " I never saw my father, and I don't know where he is." The pretty maid was sorrowful when she heard this answer. As if she was comparing the happiness of her lot with the misery of his, sbe said: " Both my papa and mamma are alive. I have a brother, beside, who is an officer in the army." Another cry of, " No talking, Miss Crosier," came from the go- verness. After a moment, when she thought the governess's suspicions were allayed, the simple child asked, " Shouldn't you like to see your father?" The boy, forgetting the warning she had given him, looked up in her face, and answered sorrowfully, " I would walk miles even to see where he was buried, if I knowed the spot. I have been told he was a gentleman, but even if he was the poorest man living, I'd crawl on my hands and knees — ay, hundreds of miles — if I knowed wbere to see bis face." Here the conversation dropped, for Helen, who was a gentle- hearted girl for all her laughing, seeing with what earnestness Philip had spoken, began to upbraid herself for having unconsciously wounded his feelings. When she heard Emma Twining sigh and mutter, in her rich, soft voice, " Poor boy !" Helen took it as a rebuke for her thoughtlessness, and whispered back, excusingly, " I did not mean to hurt him, dear." The dreams and fancies that used to fill the lad's mind even when he was a mere infant at the pauper school — the strange ideas to which he had often, as he lay on the grass with his face turned up to the clouds, sought to give shape and truthfulness, again came rising to his brain. He seemed to have forgotten that anybody was near him, and walked along in a kind of somnambulic condition, talking to himself aloud : " They never would tell me anything about her ; no, not even nurse wouldn't. If she was a lady, as that Miss Perriman said she was, where was the harm of my knowing it ? Of course I ought to know. They ought to tell me everything. I can't even see her when I want to, because they wouldn't tell me what she was like. I dream of Sam Curt and a lot of others, but I can't dream of her, and all through them." Por the next few moments not a fault had the mistress to find with Miss Merton's behaviour, for the little donkey-boy's soliloquy had 166 PAVED WITH GOLD. frightened her into silence. The first to renew the conversation was Philip. One of the animals stumbled, and called him back to himself again. He was a singular, fitful youth ; in tears one second, and laughing the next. Directly he saw the little ladies' faces, he seemed to wake up from his dreams ; he even thought it was an excellent opportunity for obtaining a translation of the French words the little lady had spoken about him, so, half turning round, he said, " I've seen you before, and you called me a ' sal pettit garsong-la.' "What does that mean?" At first Miss Helen blushed as scarlet as her brother's brightest regimentals, and then she began to shake with laughter, so that Emma was obliged to think of the mistress, and say to her, " Oh ! don't, there's a dear!" "When she had partially recovered from her excitement, she felt em- barrassed as to what answer to give. She did not dare to tell Philip to his face that she had called him a dirty little boy ; it would be much kinder, she thought, to deceive him by telling a fib, and, looking him full in the face, she replied, with the greatest sang-froid, " It means, * "What a handsome young man that is.' " JSTow it was Philip's turn to look silly, and feel uncomfortable, whilst Emma Twining was so astounded at her friend's duplicity, that she began to splutter with giggling, whilst her cheeks puffed out, and her eyes puckered up, in endeavouring to restrain her mirth. Then came the terrible voice of the governess again, "Miss Twining, copy out ' I must not laugh,' fifty times, when you get home, and as for you, Miss Crosier, I shall report you." Poor Emma began to tremble like a mariner's compass, and once again did the other wicked child shake herself as if she was trying to slip out of her clothes, and the eyebrows bobbed up and down into all manner of shapes. "The nasty old thing!" said the bad girl, "I wish that donkey would kick up behind and throw her off, that I do." Being close to her side, Philip heard her wish, and so anxious was he to do something in return for the complimentary " ce sal pettit gar- song-la," that he turned round and said, " I could make old Indy Bubber, wot she's riding of, kick in a minute, if I choosed." "Can you?" was the quick reply; "mind she doesn't see you talking to us. I'll give you a penny if you'll make old India Bubber kick." " I don't want your pennies," said Phil, indignantly. "I'll do it for nothing, for you" ""Well, look here, boy," continued the little tempter; "my pa's coming to see me on Thursday next, and I'll make him hire you to give me a ride ; only mind and bump her well." This was enough for Philip, and pleased him better than all the pennies in the Bank of England. So he dropped behind, and allowed the cavalcade to pass until he was near the mistress, and under the pretence of asking which way they were to go, he kept by her side, waiting for his opportunity to torment her. He well knew that one of India Bubber's peculiarities was extreme irritability whenever any- PAVED WITH GOLD. 167 body placed the hand on her backbone. She could bear a good deal of flogging without evincing much restlessness, but the moment she felt a pressure behind the saddle, she became frisky and gay, and spitefully lively in her demeanour. The poor governess could not imagine what had come to her hitherto docile steed. She felt herself raised up behind as suddenly as if she had been lifted by a wave, and bumped forward several times in succession — a sensation somewhat resembling that of being churned. India Eubber was lashing her tail about, and throwing her legs vigorously in all directions. " Go away, boy, it's you frightening her, n cried the lady, in alarm ; but Phil remained, protesting his innocence, and at the same time pinching India Eubber harder and harder, until at length the enraged animal threw up its heels with as much violence as if it were going to turn a somersault, and the lady, being totally unprepared for this evolution, was propelled forward with the velocity of a champagne cork, although her progress through the air was fortunately checked by the stirrup, which forced her back again to her seat with the jerk of a lasso. The dignified, upright position which had hitherto distin- guished her deportment in the saddle vanished entirely, for her body fell down like a lid over the animal's neck, and for a few seconds she remained in an attitude similar to that which Johnny Gilpin is sup- posed to have assumed when passing through Edmonton. All the young ladies heard their mistress call out, " Oh, take me off this donkey! take me off! oh, oh, oh!" And as they turned round, and saw her clinging to the pommel, the mirth and enjoyment they were trying to conceal came gurgling up to their little mouths. It is a painful portion of our duty to be obliged to state that Miss Crosier so enjoyed the scene, that her head fell back on her shoulders, and the only sound that came from her open mouth was one which resembled that produced by a person whilst using a gargle. At length her full throat began to work like that of a canary in song, making her bonnet-strings tremble as her laughter streamed up, and then such a flood of rich, melodious chuckles gushed forth, that she must have been heard a mile off, and made everybody within that distance cachinnate from sympathy. The expression of the countenance of the governess, as she heard the wicked Helen's bursts of delight, was sublime from contempt and fearful with anger, and the remarkable vigour which she threw into the words, " Miss Crosier, write out one hundred times, * I should not laugh at the misfortunes of others,' " ought to have made that young lady sink to the ground with shame and contrition. The most melancholy result of this revengeful proceeding was that the governess insisted upon quitting the back of India Eubber, and as she was forced to proceed at a walking pace, she issued an order that all the young ladies should follow her example. So much to Miss Helen's disappointment, all hopes of a gallop were dispelled. " Never mind, miss," said Phil, consoling her, " w r ait till Thursday, and then I'll give you such a run as shall make you stiff for months to come." 168 TAVED WITH GOLD. Eor two or three days after this memorable academic expedition, Philip was so wrapt in thought that his bearing towards his com- panions seemed haughty and distant, and in retaliation it was resolved the nickname of "my nobs" should henceforth be conferred upon him. Whenever he appeared on the heath the boys used to grin at him, and shout out "my nobs," in full chorus. He did all he could to try and convince his friends that he was not proud, but pensive ; yet he met with no success. He tried to silence their evil tongues by lending them money, but though they were civil enough until the monetary transaction was completed, yet no sooner had the coin changed hands than once more he became "my nobs." Even sharing his food with his enemies did not soften their hearts. If Phil was thoughtful and abstracted, and did not talk and mingle with the other boys as he had formerly done, it was not, as they thought, because he had suddenly given way to pride, but for a far deeper reason. "What on earth was a poor donkey-boy to be proud of? He was continually thinking over the words little Helen Crosier had spoken. He would say to himself, "What a curious thing that her brother's name should be Merton as well as mine ! She said she wondered if I was a relation, but she was only laughing at me. Yet everybody used to say my mother had been a lady. Only fancy if we was actually relations!" And this idea would torment him until it monopolised all his time and thought. Perhaps whilst he was in the midst of his aspiring meditations, the other lads would gather round him and begin taunting "my nobs" for having withdrawn from their society, and as he had made no secret of the supposed respectability of his parents, they never failed to allude with the bitterest sarcasm they were capable of to the subject of his illustrious descent. He and the other boys were one afternoon bathing in the pond by the Kilburn fields, when a direct set upon Phil was made by the satirical young rogues. Nothing was addressed directly to him, but it was evident that he was intended to hear all that was said. He clenched his teeth together very tightly as he heard one ask " Whether it was true that ' nob's' father had once been King of England before he took to keeping an oyster - stall ?" and his muscles tightened when another replied, as soon as the laughter had subsided, " I've heard * my nob's' mother was a heiress, and married the dandy dogs'- meat man." In despair of being able to put an end to these annoyances by any pacific means, Philip uttered the tremendous threat that " The very next person who insulted him should receive such a drubbing as should ensure civility for years to come." Now donkey-boys are notoriously brave, and will never allow anything like intimidation. The consequence was, that Phil had scarcely spoken his big words before Bill Kurney, one of Slopman's boys, shouted back in defiance, " If you want to fight, ' my nobs,' here's for you," and into the water he leapt. Now began the horrors of war. First they skirmished about, PAVED WITH GOLD. 169 splashing each other with water, until at last the savage Mertou waded towards his opponent with clenched fists, whilst the deter- mined Kurney, daring to the last, hissed and shouted out, " My nobs !" as if he was singing his war-song. They" ducked each other unmercifully, wrestling as well as their wet arms would let them. Sometimes they held each other's heads under water until the bub- bles of their breath came to the surface as rapidly as the gas in soda water. Then, black in the face, and panting, they would rise to wipe the moisture from their eyes, and prepare for another tussle. Philip's rage made him stubborn, and gained him the victory, for though he was sometimes nearly suffocated, he would give no signs of his discomfiture, whilst Kurney no sooner found himself over- whelmed by difficulties than he roared out at the top of his voice, " Murder, murder, help ! I'm getting drownded !" At last it was determined by the lookers-on that the scene of the combat should be changed from the water to the dry land, and both combatants, who had apparently had enough of the nautical engage- ment, willingly assented to the proposal. "Whilst the boys were slipping on their clothes, Jack Burt remarked to a friend of his, " I never saw two such hard ones ; Phil's as tough as cow beef." " Yes," joined in Snorting Sam, " but if Kurney holds his head up I don't believe he'll get the worst of it now." Sam Curt never did like Phil much. Perhaps he was a little jealous of him. Whilst the boys were dressing, they continued crowing at each other like a couple of game cocks, threatening to inflict all sorts of injuries. "Whilst menacing each other, they adopted the slang in fashion among donkey -boys, so that their threats, though very fearful to their understanding, had rather a comic meaning to the uninitiated. Philip intimating that, as soon as he had put on his trousers, he would blacken Pill's eyes, roared out, " Wait till I've togged my ' round-the- houses,' and then I'll cook your * mince-pies' for you." To this Kurney retorted, " I'll have yer down on ' the last card of your pack' as soon as I've laced my ' German flutes' " — meaning thereby that when his hoots were arranged he would throw Philip on his back. " You won't know your ' lump o' lead' when I've finished with you," cried Merton, referring to his antagonist's head. " I'll smash your ' glass case,' and damage your ' north and south/ " roared Bill, referring to the face and mouth of his opponent. In this curious language did they defy each other, speaking of the jaw as a "jackdaw," calling an arm a "five-acre farm," and terming a nose an "I suppose," and in fact never making use of the word they intended, but employing in its stead some expression which rhymed with it. When the young urchins did begin to fight, they had a very terri- ble set-to, and hurt each other as much as ever they could, but it happened most providentially that their limbs were not so powerful as tbeir rage, or they must have knocked each other to atoms. Whilst they were sparring up to each other, Phil would cry out, passionately, " My mother married a dandy dogs' -meat man, did she ?" 170 PAYED WITH GOLD. or, " My fattier was King of England, was he ?" and then rush head first at his enemy, who, determined not to be intimidated, would growl back in defiance, " Yes, 'my nobs, 5 that's the exact state of things." They fought long enough, however, for each of them to discover that they were very well matched, and for the future it would be more prudent to remain friends instead of foes. So Phil allowed Mr. Kurney from that day to call him, behind his back, "My nobs," and never afterwards was Bill heard to threaten young Merton either with "punching his lump of lead," or "throwing out his five-acre farm," or " stopping Phil's jackdaw with a crack on his north and south." You may be sure that Phil never forgot the promise the little school-girl made him. When Thursday came, he seated himself on the wooden railings near Jack Straw's Castle, and he passed the morning as contentedly as a parrot on its perch. He listened for the roll of carriage wheels, and kept his eyes moving in every direction so as to be the first to discover when a certain pink muslin dress should come fluttering down the road. He was in a dreadful state of anxiety lest any other boy should speak to her before him. Many times when a carriage passed did he rush into the road and, at the peril of getting run over, peep into the comfortable interior, hoping to catch sight of the little lady's bright face. He had made up his mind that her papa must keep an equipage, for he had noticed that Miss Helen was the only girl in the school who had a gold watch and chain. His greatest fear was, that he should be ordered out with any donkeys, and so miss the damsel. He let Sam Curt go out three times running, and although it was a good sixpence out of his pocket, yet he never thought of that, but was only glad to shuffle the job off to some one else. "I don't know why I should like her," he thought. " She ain't half so pretty as Bertha, for her eyes is always laughing and making fun, but sister's has such a fond look in them, they wouldn't frighten a bird away. I suppose it's because she said something about my being a relation, though she was only larking." The afternoon was passing rapidly, and yet he was still on the look- out, though he was getting rather tired and impatient at being made a fool of, as he called it. Several times he had complained to a brick wall close by, asking the solid masonry, " Why did she say she was coming if she wasn't ?" Often and often he would run to have a look at the hotel clock, making up his mind he would give her a quarter of an hour longer, and if she didn't come by that time there was an end of the matter. He was, indeed, so doubtful about seeing her, that he had even tossed up some halfpence to see how his luck stood, but the hope was so strong within him that, although he lost five times out of six, he philosophically refused to believe in that method of divina- tion. At length, just as he was on the verge of despair, and had raised his closed fist preparatory to uttering some dreadful imprecation on the bonnet of the unconscious school-girl, he heard a voice close to PAVED WITH GOLD. 171 him, which made him jump off his rail with the vigour of a grass- hopper. "This is the little boy with the same name as yours, Merton," cried Helen, the owner of the voice. " How do you do, little Mer- ton ? I've Drought big Merton to see you." And then she began to laugh and nod her head alternately to Phil and a tall young gentle- man, with a dropping moustache, who had fixed his glass in his eye and was examining his namesake. He did not seem pleased with the inspection, for he said nothing, but let his glass fall, and then moved his brows about as if he was getting them right again after frowning. It was evident that the old gentleman with the tawny, unbleached face, that seemed hard as if it had been carved in bees' -wax, was Miss Helen's papa, for she held his long thin hand in hers, and seemed very happy to be by his side. This old gentleman, although he was trying to smile, looked very severe, for his features were not flexible, but seemed tough and hard as saddle leather, and his expression was more as if he had a nasty taste in his mouth than anything else. His cold eyes, with wrinkles starting in every direction like the cracks in starred glass, made Phil feel uncomfortable when they looked at him. The boy, too, could not help noticing the gentleman seemed to have lost his lips, for there was no red edging to the mouth, but it closed as a slit in an orange would. He was dressed in black, and was solemn and heavy as a hulk, with just one dab of white, like a port- hole, where the shirt showed above the waistcoat. Indeed, Phil half wished that this old gentleman had not come with his little daughter. " So this is the little fellow, is it ?" said papa. " Come, sir, you must be kind enough to let us have your best donkey, to give this young lady a ride." " Then, if you'll take my word for it, have Light Heart, the best as ever carried a saddle," answered Phil, starting off to fetch the vaunted animal. The big Merton laughed affectedly at the little Merton's earnest manner. He was a very handsome young fellow, despite a certain languid expression, which gave you an idea that he was ready for bed- time. The keys of a piano were not more regular than his teeth, and his nose was as aquiline as a ratchet cut. As for whiskers, his were so bushy birds might have built in them, and on his chin was a tuft nearly as big as a rabbit's tail. He was not dressed in black, but wore a shawl-patterned waistcoat, and his blue coat was thrown back over his shoulders as open as folding- doors. He seemed very mildly happy, and proud of being able to keep his eye-glass fastened under his eyebrow, though it gave him somewhat the appearance of an owl blind of one eye. There was a third gentleman present, who was evidently a French- man, for whenever he addressed the big Merton he called him " Mon eher Mareton," and gesticulated like a preacher. He had shaved off his whiskers, but you could still trace their shape by a bluish granu- lar stain. His heavy moustache had been clipped over his mouth as regularly as thatch over a cottage window, and he had the faculty of laughing instantaneously and stopping as quickly. One or two 172 PAVED WITH GOLD. donkey-boys, who were watching him, were astounded at the size of his ears, which stood out like handles on each side of his cleanly- shaved face. In his moments of polite merriment, his round, smooth countenance became dimpled and nobbed by the forcing up of the cheeks. Whoever his tailor was, he understood the art of cutting trousers, though his coat fitted his plump body too much like a pud- ding-bag, and Phil at one time thought he wore stays. This foreign gentleman also seemed to be very good-natured, for when Eedpoll Jack recommended him to have a donkey as well as the young lady, he laughed till he had to wipe his forehead, and told Helen that her friends the boys were " des gamins and tres droles, and wanted to make a donkey of him, he should think, ha ! ha IV ( He made one observation, which was very curious. He pointed out to his friends that Phil's face was not at all like that of an Eng- / lish boy's, for the features were too round and formed, and in fact re- ( sembled those of the children in his own country. He even went so far as to ask the lad whether either of his parents was an Stranger. There is no sensation more annoying than feeling certain you have seen a face before, and yet being unable to call to mind the w r hen and the where. Philip was turning over all the leaves in his memory, endeavouring to satisfy himself where he had seen the big Merton before. He remembered the face as distinctly as he did the statue at Charing-cross. Later in the day the mystery was cleared up, and in the languid youth Phil recognised one of the officers who, one night in the Haymarket, when he (Phil) was a crossing-sweeper, had or- dered the Duck to throw mud at Nurse Hazlewood. " I wish I dare send a stone at him," thought little Merton. . They strolled along as far as Highgate, chatting and talking toge- ther, papa never addressing the Trench gentleman without a great show of courtesy, and pompously calling him Monsieur le Colonel (only he pronounced it Mussu). The foreign officer also behaved with excessive politeness, and whenever he spoke to the languid youth, called him " mon ami Mareton," or " mon cher capitaine." Indeed, it was truly delightful to witness the glossy elegance of manner all the gentlemen displayed. Even laughing little Helen herself felt awed by their imposing conduct, for as she afterwards told Emma Twining, it was like being in school again. It did not make much impression on Phil though, but he walked quietly along, leading the donkey, and never opened his mouth unless it was to check symptoms of frivolity on the part of Light Heart by such exclamations as " No, you don't, you hussey !" or " Steady, you warmint !" to bring her back to a sense of her servitude. Presently the old gentleman, who was apparently fond of inquiring into the condition of the lower orders, asked Phil, in a condescend- ingly kind tone of voice, such questions as " How many donkeys hia master had, and how much the boys made at the business ?" He also called the boy " his young friend." He listened with the greatest attention as Phil replied : " Well, there's eleven masters altogether, and mine — which is Sparker by name — has got six donkeys, and one on 'em he wouldn't take 4J. for. He had another first-rater as we called Lord Cocktail, PAVED WITH GOLD. 173 but she was drowned last winter in the Vale of Health — got on the ice under the hedge for warmth, and the thaw came, and in she went, and then the frost came again, and regular potted her. He gave over 3£. for her, for donkeys is wonderful scarce. You can't look at one under fifty shillings. As for what he earns," he continued, remem- bering the second portion of the question, " that's according to what we brings home. If it's a good day, we get maybe three shillings, or if it's a bad one, only eighteenpence, per'aps ; but we depends most upon -what gentlefolks give us," he added, giving the old gentleman a strong hint. " And I hope you're a good boy, and don't use bad language, but go to church regularly, eh ?" continued Mr. Crosier, senior. Philip, who every Sunday had to fetch an old lady home in a Bath chair when divine service was over, answered without hesitation that he never missed attending church unless it was very wet, which, of course, was perfectly true. The quarrels he had lately had with his companions seemed to have greatly influenced the description he gave of the deplorable and benighted condition of the other donkey-boys. He was evidently avenging himself by slandering them. " They never goes near a church," said Phil, " unless it's to play at ' chuck and toss' on the tombstones ; and there's one boy, of ^the name of Bill Kurney, he's got the awfullest foul mouth for swearing you ever came near. You'd wonder his teeth wasn't blighted and turned black in his head with the words he uses. You shall hear him when we get back." If Captain Merton Crosier had been by himself, he would have been sure to burst out laughing at this last speech, but the stern-looking father evidently was a great restraint on the son's conduct, and as Mr. Merton, senior, was muttering, " This is sad, very sad," Mr. Merton, junior, thought it more prudent to appear deeply afflicted by the terrible account. " Never use bad language, my young friend," said the papa, ex- hort ingly. " 1 never do, sir, only to the donkeys," answered Phil, putting on a look of innocence. " But why swear at all?" urged the kind gentleman. "You will tell me that it gives force to your language. You will say that it ensures obedience through fear ; but since it is only the sound of your voice, and not the words, that these animals obey, what need is there for you to blaspheme when a shout would answer as well ? Do you understand, my young friend ?" Here the little lady, coming to Phil's defence, said, " You mustn't scold him, papa. Eemember, I told you he never had any parents to watch over him." Everybody stared at Phil with curiosity. The French officer ap- peared quite overcome with sympathy, and cried out, " Pauvre mou- tard !" and the English one looked knowing, as if he suspected that the boy had been gammoning his sister. The solemn Mr. Crosier, senior, shook his head, and asked, " Are both your parents dead ?" "My mother's dead," replied Phil. " She went away before I can 174 PAYED WITH GOLD. remember her ; but perhaps my father's alive — though it wouldn't matter, as far as I am concerned, for he never seems to have cared much about me, or else, why did he leave a fellar ?" "Did he desert your mother?" inquired Captain Merton Crosier. " I don't know if he deserted her, because she died," continued Phil ; "but he seems to have left me to take pot-luck." "Quel scelerat !" exclaimed the French colonel, looking the picture of indignation — as if he would like to punish the villain. " Now, with us in France, such a similar thing is impossible. Our system of passports, however you Anglais grumble at them, prevent such affairs." " And was your father called Merton ?" inquired the old gentleman. Phil answered, "I don't know about that. I'm called Philip Merton, and Katherine Merton was the name my mother went by — so Nurse Hazlewood told me." " Katherine Merton !" he cried, with a tone of surprise. Then, in a more quiet voice he added, " And who is Nurse Hazlewood, my little man?" For a moment the boy hesitated, as if ashamed to reply ; but at length, a3 if he had conquered any feeling of pride, he answered, " I ought to call her mother ; and I used to when I was young, for she was as good and kind to me as she was to her own child. But if you want to know who she was, she was nurse at the workhouse where I was sent, and it was she as told me my mother was a lady." There was no reason on earth why the solemn old gentleman should have suddenly become so excited, and anxious to learn more of the history of this boy. Over and over again did he ask, " And are you sure, my young friend, you cannot remember your father's name ?" And although Philip answered, " I tell you I never knowed him," until he was tired by the monotony of the reply, yet Mr. Crosier, senior, seemed unwilling to drop the subject, so often begging of the boy to try and remember, that at last little Helen, not understanding what such questionings could lead to, turned round laughing to her father to tease him for his curiosity. Then she saw that his face was pale, and his eye unnaturally brilliant with excitement, and involun- tarily she cried out, " What is the matter, papa ? Are you ill ? You are so dreadfully pale ! Merton, dear, make him sit down." The solemn papa did not like to be stared at and pitied. He said it was all nonsense, and, forcing up a laugh, asked how they imagined that one of his age could walk so great a distance without feeling dis- tressed ? But that was only an excuse, for he was suffering from excitement, and not fatigue, as was evident by his manner. There was a dead silence among the party when the next question was put, and even Phil was frightened at finding so much interest taken about him. " Did you ever, my boy — now try and remember — don't be afraid to take your time — did you ever hear anybody mention a person named Vautrin ?" He waited almost breathlessly, until Phil replied, PAVED WITH GOLD. 17$ " No, I can't say I ever did hear of such a name ; but there's a boy on the heath as is called Volby, if you think he'd suit you." "What should have made the French colonel start and fall back, as if somebody had suddenly called out his name ? On the cards he carried in his pocket was engraved " Le Colonel Victor Baudin Eat- taplan, du ll e Leger." Then what should he care for such a person as Yautrin ? And when the papa took out his pocket-book to write down .the name of the workhouse where Philip had passed his infancy, !why did this French officer keep on repeating to himself, " St. Lazarua Union," as if he was afraid of forgetting the address ? "What will not people do for a few hours' pleasure ? There were two maid-servants living in a big white house on the right-hand side of the heath — where the ivy on the wall stands out like a portico, so that when it rains the cows will go there for shelter — and these two poor girls would get up at four o'clock in the morning for what ? — to have a donkey ride. They had got their long day's work before them, and anybody would fancy that every moment of sleep would be of consequence to give them strength for the day's labour, but merely for the pleasure of sitting upon a donkey's back, and feeling it move along with them, they did not mind rising betimes, before any of the family were stirring. They would go to Phil overnight, and coax him to be waiting round the corner, and as the clock struck four they would come out of the back garden gate, and be off on the romp. It was not a bad job for Philip, although it did come rather too early in the morning, for when they returned back again at six, they would give the boy such a big bundle of bread and meat that he had no oc- casion to buy any more food for that day at least. They never met with anybody during such rides, unless it was old Tom Pugh, the water-carrier, who, striding his tub on wheels like a temperance Bac- chus, sat looking at his white horse, whose wabbling ears dangled about almost as loosely as the pails swinging behind the vehicle. " Good morning, Tom," the girls would cry out. " Don't you tell you saw us, or we'll beat you as black as a cinder." While Philip was galloping these girls across the heath, he saw something lying on the ground, and as the donkey-boys are always on the look-out for treasure, the moment Phil saw this something, he dropped his stick as if accidentally, as an excuse for lagging behind, and returning to fetch it, picked up a purse. Judging from human nature, and having closely watched the man- ners and habits of infants of a tender age, we have come to the con- clusion that honesty is entirely a matter of education, and is no more an instinct born in us than forgiving your enemy, or eating with a fork. Now, as the education of donkey-driving boys may be safely quoted at nil, much honesty cannot be expected of them, and even if it was, the expectation would most certainly be disappointed. "When Sam Curt one day picked up a gold snuff-box, he never for one moment thought it might possibly belong to somebody, but jerking it hastily among some ferns, he marked the spot well, and fetched the treasure at night. 176 PAVED WITH GOLD. As there was not a soul to be seen stirring on the heath, Philip did not think it worth while to take any such precaution with his god- Bend, but with a clown's rapidity slipped it into his pocket, thinking to himself " the early bird catches the early worm," and a very pretty worm too. He was all impatience until the two servant girls had re- turned home again, for his fingers were itching to open the clasp and peep into the interior. He was quite astonished at his good fortune, for it was along that very road that he had passed on the previous evening when he was escorting the little school-girl. He felt sure the purse was not there then, or he must have seen it. "When the ride was over he did not wait to take the donkeys back to the stand, but sought out some very secluded spot and took out the treasure. "It's a first-rate looking thing," he thought to himself, "and must have gold in it. If there are only a few shillings, however, I shan't mind." When he opened it, the features of his face relaxed with astonish- ment, and he flung the purse away with disappointment. There was not a single coin in any of its pockets. The only thing he could find was an old doubled-up card, with " Viscount Ascot" printed in minute letters in the centre and surmounted by an imposing crest. He could not help exclaiming in disgust, " A viscount, and not a farthing! "Why I'm as good a viscount as he- is! Call hisself a nobleman, and not carry even such a thing as a pint of beer about him! If that's your aristocracy, why a donkey-boy's a king — that's all." There was a certain stout foreigner with a thick moustache who would have given Phil a golden sovereign to have regained that purse, although there was not even a farthing in the pockets : but how was the boy to know that. . CHAPTER XI. CAPTAIN MERTON CROSIER AT HOME. "With a handsome allowance from his father, and sick leave of absence from his regiment, Captain Crosier leads the happiest life of any man in London. He has capital rooms in Harley-street. He has bargained for a latch-key, and every morning of his life his break- fast is brought up to him in bed. If the stern papa, who has just come up from Swanborough to settle some business in town, had the least idea that his son was such a dissipated young dog, it would have caused him not only to feel great parental grief, but also to diminish, by at least one half, the cheques that every three months were paid in to Captain Merton's account. But whilst the "governor" is stopping at Biddle's Hotel in Brook- street, the son is on his best behaviour, and conducts himself with the PAYED WITH GOLD. 177 decorum of a bishop. He bewails in private, to a few intimate friends, what a dreadful bore it is to him to be always bothering about with the old gentleman, and complains of the slow hotel dinners, and beiug doomed to drink glass for glass from the one bottle of port. But, as he says, " one must be civil to one's own father, you know." When Captain Crosier dines and spends the evening with his parent, he rings for his hat and gloves as the clock strikes half-past ten, apologising for his early departure by saying, " I'm sorry to leave you so soon, sir ; but I'm on sick leave, and eleven o'clock is my time for bed." Then the father, delighted to see such prudence in his boy, mutters to himself, " I'm glad to see Merton so steady and careful," and shakes his hand almost with gratitude for such exemplary conduct. But, instead of bending his steps towards Harley-street, Captain Crosier lights his cigar, and saunters towards the Haymarket, there to mingle with choice spirits like himself, and pass the night in visiting the saloons and night-houses, until he has spent all the money in his pocket but just sufficient to pay for his cab home. It is his boast that he was never yet so " cut" but what he could, after a little fencing with the keyhole, open the street-door for himself. The captain has been fortunate in finding such excellent apartments, for they have all the convenience of chambers, without their solitude. He seems to do just as he likes in the house. Sometimes, when he comes home at four o'clock in the morning, he will begin to play the piano, but no complaints are ever made about the unreasonable hour of the performance, although the captain, at such times, generally presses down both pedals, and his touch, if not musically correct, is, however, both brilliant and powerful. The handsomest piece of furniture in the room is decidedly a tulip-wood cabinet for holding cigars. There are only one or two chairs, which it is not safe to sit down upon, and the carpet, which was once very handsome, would have a cheerful effect still if the captain and his friends did not spill beer on the white parts and tread cigar-ashes in the dark ones. The walls had a more furnished look when the dissipated lodger first came, but he insisted upon having the three-quarter portrait of the late Mr. Bullunty, by Tomeston, removed from the chamber, giving as a reason, that whenever he returned home at night the head used to stare at him. He threatened that if it was not taken away he should be forced to smash the masterpiece. About twelve o'clock in the day, Caplain Crosier, with his dress- ing-gown on, throws himself upon the sofa, ready to receive any friends that may drop in upon him. In they come, one after another, Fred Tattenham and Tom Oxendon, both calling out lustily for bitter ale, then Charley Sutton to borrow a clean collar and a razor, and after a time le Colonel Victor Baudin Eattaplan, who makes himself so thoroughly at home that, without being invited, he helps himself to a cigar, and sends clouds of smoke down his nose, as he exclaims, " Dese cigar is capital, mon cher, but dey wants to be kep." " How did you manage Oaks last night, after I went away," asks the captain. "We put him in a cab, and sent him home," answers Fred Tatten- ham ; " I never saw a fellow so utterly done up." 178 PAVED WITH GOLD. "I wonder what's become of Tom G-arden," inquires Charley Sutton. " Oh, he's gone to Boulogne, or the Bench," suggested his friend Tattenham. " Where did you disappear, colonel," he adds, after a time, turning to the Frenchman. " We play at ecarte till breakfast- time," is the answer. ■ Then you haven't been' to bed ?" inquires the captain. " Ma foi, non. I never care to sleep ;" and he smiles as if he thought everybody was saying, "What an extraordinary man he is !" He is asked if he won, and he shrugs his shoulders in reply, that being a kind of answer which can be taken either way, although, if the truth must be told, the colonel seldom loses at cards, although he generally plays high. Whilst Captain Crosier is lighting his cigar, a sudden thought strikes him. He says between the whiffs, " Oh, I've had such a jolly letter from Viscount Ascot, saying that he can't go to the prize-fight on Monday." As he is rather proud of his aristocratic friend, he takes this letter from his pocket and reads it aloud : " ' Dear Crosier, — A hundred thanks, but I'm engaged, though I'd give pounds to be with you. You must be the bearer of my apologies to our different friends. Yours, &c, " < Ascot.' " When he has finished reading, he throws the letter down on the table, adding, " Isn't that like the old fellow — short and jolly ?" Le Colonel Victor Baudin Eattaplan, du ll e Leger, says, " The style is quite Anglais," and picks up the note. Whilst the others are chatting, he appears to be making quite a study of the hand- writing. The words which seem to interest him most are " hundred," " pounds," and " bearer." The signature of the noble lord he appa- rently admires excessively, for he twists the paper about, and peers into it with extraordinary curiosity. When he puts the note down again, he gives a hasty glance round the room, as if to see if his actions have been noticed, and then, finding nobody had paid the least attention to what he was doing, he slips the epistle under a book, and assuming his most careless manner, walks up and down the room with his hands in his pockets. He is in such excellent spirits, and laughs and jokes with so much vivacity, that it is impossible to believe that he has been up all night. All the fellows agree that the French are a wonderful people and never seem to be tired of amusing them- selves, but as the colonel says, " He has passed too many sleepless nights encamped in de plains of Algeria to feel epuised with a little card-playing." When he is asked to tell some of the Erench stories, he makes the young fellows shout again with his wit, and, indeed, we regret deeply that we cannot introduce some of his capital anecdotes into these pages, only sometimes gentlemen in the army meet with adventures that are not exactly fitted for the ears of civilians. When the Colonel Victor Baudin has concluded his little perform- ance, the chatting again commences. v -rL^^ia^ . is