THE OLD TEMPLE BAR.
CHAPTER IX.
PETTICOAT LANE.
THERE is no Petticoat Lane any more, some finnicky board having very foolishly changed the good old name to Middlesex street. There was something suggestive in the name “Petticoat Lane,” for it indicated with great accuracy the business carried on there, but there is nothing suggestive about Middlesex street. It might as well have been called Wellington street, or Wesley street, or Washington street. I hate these changes. A street is a street, and calling it an avenue don’t make it so. Why not Petticoat Lane? By any other name it smells as strong. It is Petticoat Lane and always will be Petticoat Lane, and despite the edict of the board, the Londoner calls it by that title and always will.
Petticoat Lane is a long, tortuous narrow street, properly a lane, (about the width of an ordinary alley in an American city,) in the heart of the city proper. It is probably the dirtiest spot on the globe. If there is a dirtier I do not wish to see it—or, more especially, to smell it. It is the very acme of filth, the incarnation of dirt, and the very top, the peaked point of the summit of rottenness.
A friend of mine who had lost the sense of smell was condoled with on his misfortune.
“Don’t pity me,” he said, “please don’t. It is a blessing, and not a misfortune. In this imperfect world there are more bad smells than perfumes. If I am deprived of one delight I escape a dozen inflictions. If I can’t enjoy the rose, I, at least, dodge the tan yard.”
Precisely so another friend who had his right leg torn off in a threshing machine during the war, reveled in his cork leg, because, having but one flesh and blood foot, he only took half the chances of ordinary mortals of taking cold from wet feet.