Again he muttered something that sounded like "Knocked Up;" to which I mildly replied that he certainly looked as if he was so; and then I inquired what I could do for him; but, to my astonishment, this seemed to vex him. At last I found that he was a Knocker-Up, and that he had called for his week's "brass." I saw at once that the old man was astray; and the moment I told him where he was, his eyes seemed to fill with a new light, and he exclaimed, "By th' mon, aw'm i'th wrang street!" And then, holding his trousers up, still, with one hand, away he ran, and was no more seen by me.
The Complaint of a Sad Complaint.
To the Editor of the Weekly Growl.
Sir,—I am a nuisance, and therefore I suppose it is right, in the abstract, that I should be put down. Unfortunately, however, many of the persons and things by which I am surrounded are the same to me, and I feel, by fits, vastly inclined to extinguish them, although I know full well, in my sane moments, that they are generally useful. And so it is, right to the end of the piece; everything and everybody is, by turns, a nuisance to everybody and everything else; and if there were no restraint upon the public vanity, and private pique, and officious frivolities which affect these conflicting elements, the whole body politic, being composed of nuisances, would be destroyed, like the Irish cats in the story. In fact, sir, there is nobody in the world that is not a nuisance to somebody; though that is hardly a sufficient reason why they should be allowed to worry one another. But in these days, the art and mystery of grumbling—that native prerogative which has grown up so luxuriantly in the soil of our English freedom, that the grumblers now constitute an eminently valuable power in the state—the art and mystery of grumbling (it really is artful and mysterious sometimes) is now growing into a kind of social scurvy, more annoying than serviceable, and sometimes exceeding in offensiveness the nuisances which it scratches into notice. The contagion is getting to such a pitch just now, that it is time for the nuisances to speak for themselves—for even a nuisance has a right side—and although I myself am one, I shall be grateful if you will allow me—just this once—to say a few words respecting the treatment to which many of my humbler brethren are subjected by the magnates of the tribe. I feel the more hopeful that you will grant this, since I know that I am not the only nuisance to which you have, with admirable forbearance, opened the columns of your excellent journal.
Happily, the expression of opinion is so free in this country, that—although some offensive persons deny that a nuisance has the slightest right to appeal to any of the senses—I will venture to assert, backed by all known law and custom, that even a nuisance has a right to be heard—at least, in its own defence; thanks to that instinctive leaning to fair play which, while it deprecates anything that is foul, yet acknowledges that even foulness itself may, sometimes, have a fair side. My dear sir, we nuisances have endured so much, as we may say, from those of our own household, that the patience of the most Christian nuisance in the world must give way under such an incessant fire of impertinent insult. Ah me! there seems to be so little fellow-feeling amongst nuisances now-a-days, that it may be worth while to remind them all of the poet's little sermon beginning,—