“Only Barny Bosher’s sauce,” he said. “He’s a fightin’ man—pick of the basket at nine-stone, five—so he thinks he can sye what he likes; but he’s got a good ’eart.”
We pushed on until a small shop appeared, framed in bird-cages. Spiritless fowls of different sorts and colours sat and drooped in them—parrots, cockatoos, budgerigars, and other foreigners of a kind unfamiliar to me.
“Come in,” said Jaggers. “This is Muggridge’s shop; and what he don’t know about ’osses, an’ all livin’ things for that matter, ain’t worth knowin’.”
Mr. Muggridge was at his counter, busy about a large wooden crate bored with many holes. From these proceeded strange squeaks and grunts.
“’Alf a mo,” he said. “It’s a consignment of prize guinea-pigs, and they wants attention partickler urgent; for they’ve been on the South Eastern Railway, in a luggage train, pretty near since last Christmas by all accounts, and a luggage train on that line’s a tidy sample of eternity, I’m told.”
Mr. Muggridge was a little, bright, cheerful person, who framed his life on the philosophy of his own canaries. The shop was warm, even stuffy, perhaps—still warm; so I said one or two kind things about the beasts and birds, then took a chair and looked at my watch.
“I can wait,” I told him.
“Can the ’oss? That’s the question,” asked Jaggers, and he began to murmur something about being kept away from his work, and hard times; so I gave him a shilling, and he thanked me, though not warmly, and instantly vanished into the fog—to go on dog-fancying, no doubt.
Mr. Muggridge complimented me on my love for animals. He then began to pull strange, rough bundles of white, black, and yellow fur from his wooden crate. The things looked like a sort of animated blend between a penwiper and a Japanese chrysanthemum. Indeed, I told him so, and he retorted by advising me to take a couple home for my young people.
With a sigh, I agreed to do so, and Mr. Muggridge, evidently surprised at such ready acquiescence, grew excited, and suggested two more.