"There's nothing against me, sir. You may inquire of everybody I've worked for."
"I mean the question of a respectable appearance. Now, Timothy, you will not have the assurance to assert that you present a respectable appearance?"
"Cluck! cluck! cluck?" went the fowl in the basket.
Timothy's eyes wandered dolefully over his ragged garments.
"If my new suit of clothes hadn't been burnt," he murmured--
"But they are burnt. Spilled milk, you know. The long and the short of it is, if you can obtain a decent suit of clothes, I'll give you a trial, Timothy."
"Cluck! cluck! cluck! Cluck! cluck! cluck!" from the basket. A jubilant, noisy, triumphant flourish of trumpets, to force upon the world the knowledge of a great event. Timothy knelt down, put his hand in the basket, and drew forth a new-laid egg.
"The world's mine oyster, which I with knife will ope." But surely that knife never presented itself, as it did at the present moment, in the form of a new laid-egg.
[CHAPTER XI.]
Church Alley, in which Mr. Loveday's second-hand bookshop was situated, was not in the most squalid part of the East, wherein may be found horrible patches, in comparison with which the haunts of heathens in savage lands are a veritable paradise. It was, indeed, in close contiguity to the most respectable part of it, lying to the eastward of the famous butchers' mart, which, in the present day, is shorn of its doubtful glories. The alley was a slit in the main thoroughfare, running parallel with it, about sixty yards in length, and containing thirty-four tenements, sixteen of which were private dwellings and eighteen places of business. In the flourishing West it would have been converted into an arcade, and dignified with an imposing name drawn from royal or martial records; in the toiling East it was simply what it professed to be--an alley, very narrow, very shabby, and generally very dark. When winter fogs lay thick upon the mighty city they reached perfection by the time they floated to Church Alley and settled there. Then was the darkness truly Egyptian, and there the gloom remained, as if in proud assertion of the fitness of things, long after surrounding thoroughfares were bright. The sun rose later there and set earlier, and in freezing time it was a very heaven of slides days after surrounding space was thawing. The explanation of these unusual phenomena may be found in the circumstance that when "weather" got into Church Alley it could not easily get out. There was no roadway for horses and carts; between the rows of houses ran a footpath ten feet in width. The enterprising builder who purchased the land and designed the estate had husbanded his inches with a shrewd eye to the greatest possible number of rents to be squeezed out of them, and it must be confessed that his efforts were crowned with complete success.