“A shillin’, sir.”
“Well, here is my name and where I live, on an envelope. And here are two shillings. But if you chore mandy [cheat me] and don’t leave it at the house, I’ll look you up in the Potteries, and koor tute [whip you].”
He looked at me very seriously. “Ah, yes. You could koor me kennā [whip me now]. But you couldn’t have koored my dadas [whipped my father]. Leastways not afore he got his leg broken fightin’ Lancaster Sam. You must have heard of my father,—Single-stick Dick. But if your’re comin’ down to the Potteries, don’t come next Sunday. Come Sunday three weeks. My brother is stardo kennā for chorin a gry [in prison for horse-stealing]. In three weeks he’ll be let out, and we’re goin’ to have a great family party to welcome him, and we’ll be glad to see you. Do come.”
The flower-stand was faithfully delivered, but another engagement prevented an acceptance of the invitation, and I have never seen Dick since.
* * * * *
I was walking along Marylebone Road, which always seems to be a worn and wind-beaten street, very pretty once, and now repenting it; when just beyond Baker Street station I saw a gypsy van
hung all round with baskets and wooden-ware. Smoke issued from its pipe, and it went along smoking like any careless pedestrian. It always seems strange to think of a family being thus conveyed with its dinner cooking, the children playing about the stove, over rural roads, past common and gorse and hedge, in and out of villages, and through Great Babylon itself, as if the family had a pied à terre, and were as secluded all the time as though they lived in Little Pedlington or Tinnecum. For they have just the same narrow range of gossip, and just the same set of friends, though the set are always on the move. Traveling does not make a cosmopolite.
By the van strolled the lord and master, with his wife. I accosted him.
“Sarishan?”
“Sarishan rye!”