‘The Lodge,
‘Lilac Tree Road,
‘St. John’s Wood.’
‘Oliver Birnie!’ he exclaimed, triumphantly. ‘And keeps a carriage and pair! By Jove! Providence has not deserted me. I’m glad I didn’t recognise him in the dim light of carriage lamps, or I should have cried out and betrayed myself. I can do better by waiting, perhaps. Ah, Mr. Oliver Birnie! it isn’t a shilling I’ve earned to-night—it’s many and many a golden pound. I’ve one bird safe, at any rate. Now I’ve only Gurth Egerton to find. If he’s gone up in the world too, you are all right for a little while, Ned Marston.’
CHAPTER IV.
NO. FIFTEEN, LITTLE QUEER STREET.
Little Queer Street, Seven Dials, is not a particularly nice street to live in, but as every house in it is inhabited to the utmost extent of its inhabitable capacity, it is evidently a street in which a great many people are very glad to live.
Squalor and vice and misery, and everything that can make life horrible, find their way into Little Queer Street, but fail to frighten the inhabitants. Dirt they like—it suits them; most of them have been brought up from infancy in close contact with it, and would feel uncomfortable without it. As to vice and misery, they have seen so much of them that any terror such things might once have possessed has long since worn off. They may be real spectres to some people, but to them they are only clumsy turnip-headed bogies, and he must be a very young native of the locality indeed who would betray the suspicion of a shudder at the sight of either.
All day long the muddy roadway is blocked with costers’ barrows, who drive a roaring trade in cheap crockery, stale vegetables, doubtful meat, and still more doubtful fish, which one class looks upon as abominations, and another holds in high esteem as luxuries.
There are shops, too, in Little Queer Street. Such shops! Dusty, dirty, barn-looking rooms, where sallow-faced women sit, dishevelled and ragged, amid old boots and shoes, tumbled and dirty dresses, old coats, and promiscuous heaps of cast-off wearing apparel.
Sometimes the shop is not large enough to contain the varied assortment of ‘goods’ in which the proprietor deals, and a portion of the narrow pavement is taken into the service.