Nutts. Why, by your own account, the best of all on ’em—the Age of Soap and Water.
Slowgoe. (With newspaper.) This must have been a beautiful sight, gen’lemen, a beautiful sight, at Portsmouth. Quite makes a man’s heart beat to read about it.
Nightflit. What’s the perdicament?
Slowgoe. Quite a solemn thing. Field-Marshal Prince Albert has given a spick-and-span new set of flags to the 13th Foot, or what is called his own Light Infantry. The old ones had been so singed by fire, and torn to bits by bullets in Afghanistan, wheresomever that may be.
Nutts. Doesn’t say who ’broidered the colours, does it?
Slowgoe. Not as I see.
Nutts. That’s a pity. But I s’pose it was some o’ the women. Fine ladies, as wouldn’t so much as take up a stitch in a silk stocking acause they’d think it low and beneath ’em—fine ladies work at flags, and, I really do believe, like the work better than if it was their own baby-linen.
Limpy. How d’ ye account for that, Mr Nutts?
Nutts. Why, you see, it’s a part of the finery of sojering; and that always takes the women. And so they’ll stitch and stitch away at colours, and, for what I know, work their own precious locks of hair in ’em, acause they’re to be carried by smart young gen’lemen covered with red and daubed with gold, and the drums and the fifes and the trumpets will play about ’em; and they think that’s glory, poor souls! Silly creturs! if they only thought of the blood, and groans, and mashed limbs, and burning houses, and trodden-down babies, and screeching women, suffering worse than death—if they only thought that their needlework was to be waved and fluttered above such horrors as these, it’s my ’pinion they’d as soon do sewing and stitching for Beelzebub.
Slowgoe. Don’t be profane, Mr Nutts.