The place is absolutely a shell. There is not a sound room or passage in it. Yet it is always crammed with tenants, and they pay their rent without a murmur—nay, within the last year the rents of the rooms have been raised nearly twenty-five per cent.
The gentleman who inhabits the ground-floor with his wife and family is best off. He is a bit of a humorist, and he seems quite proud of pointing out to us the dilapidations of his dwelling-place, and takes the opportunity to indulge in what the gentlemen of the theatrical persuasion call 'wheezes.'
'Come through?' he says; 'well, no, I can't say as anybody have come through, not altogether. We sees a leg o' somebody sometimes as we ain't invited to join us, and now and agen a lump o' ceilin' comes down when the young woman upstairs stamps her foot; but so long as they don't start a dancin' acadermy up there, I don't mind.'
'But haven't you spoken to the landlord about it?'
'Spoke! Lor' bless you! wot's the use? He'd larf at us, and if he was to larf too loud it might be dangerous. He won't do nothink. The place is bound to come down, yer know, by-and-by, for improvements.'
Possibly the man's explanation of the landlord's neglect was correct, but to us it certainly appeared that the place was more likely to come down for lack of improvements.
Going to bed under such circumstances as these must require a good deal of confidence; but I suppose the contingency of the floor above descending on one in one's sleep does not have the same terror for these people that it had for the nervous hero of that story of Edgar Allan Poe's, in which the room with contracting walls and descending roof was supposed to be a horror worthy of the inventive genius of the gentlemen of the Inquisition.
Of course, when the ordinary repairs demanded by consideration for the safety of life and limb are left undone, and the most ordinary sanitary precautions are neglected, it is not likely that the present race of poor tenement-owners will listen to the appeals of those tenants whose livelihood depends upon them keeping animals, and make some provision for the housing of pigs and the stabling of donkeys.
Strange, too, as it may seem, in the houses which are being built on improved principles, no provision is made for the barrows and donkeys of the costermongers—a class which enters very largely into the composition of the one-roomed tribes. Some time ago a man was charged with assaulting his wife, and at the magisterial hearing it was elicited that the matrimonial quarrel was all on account of a donkey which slept under the bed.
The magistrate was naturally astonished. He didn't believe such a state of things possible. Doubtless his wonder was shared by the public. The presence of a donkey in the apartment of a costermonger and his family is, however, by no means rare, and quite recently a zealous sanitary inspector has discovered a cellar inhabited by a man, his wife, three children, and four pigs.