Here there arose a chatter which Nephelo found to be about matters that, unlike the water topic, did not at all interest himself. There was a rustle and a movement; and a creaking noise approached the drawing-room, which Nephelo discovered presently to be caused by papa’s boots as he marched upstairs after his post-prandial slumberings. There was more talk uninteresting to the fairy; Nephelo, therefore, became drowsy; his drowsiness might at the same time have been aggravated by the close confinement he experienced in an unwholesome atmosphere beneath the muffin-plate. He was aroused by a great clattering; this the maid caused who was carrying him down stairs upon a tray with all the other tea-things.
From a sweet dream of nuptials with Cirrha, Nephelo was awakened to the painful consciousness that he had not yet succeeded in effecting any great good for the human race; he had but rinsed a teapot. With a faint impulse of hope the desponding fairy noticed that the slop-basin in which he sat was lifted from the tray, in a few minutes after the tray had been deposited upon the kitchen-dresser. Pity poor Nephelo! By a remorseless scullery-maid he was dashed rudely from the basin into a trough of stone, from which he tumbled through a hole placed there on purpose to engulf him,—tumbled through into a horrible abyss.
This abyss was a long dungeon running from back to front beneath the house, built of bricks—rotten now, and saturated with moisture. Some of the bricks had fallen in, or crumbled into nothingness; and Nephelo saw that the soil without the dungeon was quite wet. The dungeon-floor was coated with pollutions, travelled over by a sluggish shallow stream, with which the fairy floated. The whole dungeon’s atmosphere was foul and poisonous. Nephelo found now what those exhalations were which rose through every opening in the house, through vent-holes and the burrowings of rats; for rats and other venom tenanted this noisome den. This was the pestilential gallery called by the good people of the house, their drain. A trap door at one end confined the fairy in this place with other Water-Drops, until there should be collected a sufficient body of them to negotiate successfully for egress.
The object of this door was to prevent the ingress of much more foul matter from without; and its misfortune was, that in so doing it necessarily pent up a concentrated putrid gas within. At length Nephelo escaped; but, alas! it was from a Newgate to a Bastille—from the drain into the sewer. This was a long-vaulted prison running near the surface underneath the street. Shaken by the passage overhead of carriages, not a few bricks had fallen in; and Nephelo hurrying forward, wholly possessed by the one thought—could he escape?—fell presently into a trap. An oyster-shell had fixed itself upright between two bricks unevenly jointed together; much solid filth had grown around it; and in this Nephelo was caught. Here he remained for a whole month, during which time he saw many floods of water pass him, leaving himself with a vast quantity of obstinate encrusted filth unmoved. At the month’s end there came some men to scrape, and sweep, and cleanse; then with a sudden flow of water, Nephelo was forced along, and presently, with a large number of emancipated foulnesses, received his discharge from prison, and was let loose upon the River Thames.
Nephelo struck against a very dirty Drop.
“Keep off, will you?” the Drop exclaimed. “You are not fit to touch a person, sewer-bird.”
“Why, where are you from, my sweet gentleman?”
“Oh! I? I’ve had a turn through some Model Drains. Tubular drains they call ’em. Look at me; isn’t that clear?”
“There’s nothing clear about you,” replied Nephelo. “What do you mean by Model Drains?”
“I mean I’ve come from Upper George Street through a twelve-inch pipe four or five times faster than one travels over an old sewer-bed; travelled express, no stoppage.”