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The little dwarf is familiar to hundreds of Londoners. Always nursing the wall, and using a miniature crooked stick exactly like a question-mark, she hobbles through the streets like a half-human beetle, until she reaches some such place as the approach to a railway station, where she finds it profitable to stand as though in great pain, rolling sheep's eyes at the hurrying crowd. And many of those tenderhearted gentlemen and kind old ladies, and dear little overdressed children returning from a visit to Old Drury or the Tower of London, who have slipped a penny or a sixpenny-bit into the claw of the dwarf, must often have asked themselves at the time what manner of woman she is, and bothered themselves to imagine how on earth she lives. The old creature—for she is over seventy—is counted in statistics among the proud population of this Seat of Empire, and she is as much subject to the cosmic laws and as much a member of the human family as the tallest and most swaggering Lifeguards-man who ever had "Cook's Son!" shouted at him by irreverent urchin.
How she views the universe from her altitude of a yard, or a yard and three inches; what her attitude is to God and man, and how life goes with the old veteran after seventy odd years of its buffeting—these were some of the mysteries which I brought with me into her back room by the riverside for their unveiling by Miss Emma Stipp herself.
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"I'm late this mornin', I am," she says, in her shrill fashion, standing right against the fire like a demon that no flame can consume, and vigorously rubbing at the grate with her black-lead brush. "The cause is 'im," she continues, turning to point the brush at the cat sleeping on her bed, after she has rubbed the red tip of her long nose with a portion of her knuckles and a portion of the brush. "Oh, he's a villain, a dreadful villain he is," she cries, with exasperation, returning to her work; "he worries my life out, he do, the 'orrid varmint. Last night he didn't come home, he didn't. I set up for him, but he didn't come. 'Oh,' I says, 'if you're keepin' low company again,' I says, 'you can stop out all night,' I says, 'for I'll sit up for you no longer; so there, my ugly beauty.' And then in the middle of the night I wake up, I do, feeling that cold, and sneezin' and snuffin', and irritatin' I was from top to toe; and blest if Master Tom hadn't got upon the window-sill, bust open that there piece of brown paper I had pasted over the broken pane, I had, and let hisself in Yankee-doodle fashion, and left me to perish with the cold."
Her lined and wrinkled face, when she turns it to us, is not without the vestiges of attraction. The head, with its grey hair parted down the centre, is well-shaped; the forlorn-looking eyes are a pale-blue, like faded forget-me-nots; the thin, flexible nose, which is always moist, and the long, firm chin incline towards the formation known as the nut-cracker. But for her abbreviated trunk, and those few pathetic inches of twisted leg—chiefly feet—she might have passed for a matronly-looking and rather handsome old harridan, half Scotch and half Irish.
"What with the cat," she says, and then, letting her voice run up to a screech, she proceeds furiously, "and that devil of a woman downstairs! Oh! she's a wicked woman, she is, a wicked woman, a very wicked woman; she's got some of my things because I'm behind-hand in my rent, and she says she won't give them up; but she shall. I'll see that she do. Ah! I'll have the law on her—the nasty, swearing, beastly—Oh! she's a wicked woman."
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Think of the majesty of the English law which enables this pathetic yard of twisted womanhood to hold her own in a foul court against "a wicked woman" with arms like a bluejacket! But Miss Stipps is used to fighting her own battles. When children yell after her, "Old Goody Witch!" she swings about and takes her stick to them, pouring out such a flow of imprecation upon their young heads that they run away in a panic of alarm. Moreover, I have it on reliable authority that when Miss Stipps steps over the way with her jug for a pint of porter, she is in the habit, after reaching up her arm to receive the jug back from the barman, of telling the young man pretty sharply that she isn't buying froth, and that she'll trouble him to do a blow at the jug and to give another pull to his tap, which won't hurt him, it won't, as he ain't yet the proprietor of the place, and not likely to be, neither, if he treats poor ladies in sich a wulgar and Sheeny fashion.
I beg Miss Stipp to desist from her labour of dabbing the grate with streaky spots of black-lead, and implore her to take a seat and indulge herself for an easy hour in anecdotal reminiscences. Miss Stipp yields to my blandishments—that is to say, she backs against a little cobbler's stool, a stool which the Baby Bear in that immortal legend of "The Three Bears" would have found several sizes too small for it, and appears to slope half an inch to the rear. By the action of crossing her hands in her lap, and by the society smile on her face as she turns her dewy nose in my direction, I gather, though I should never have discovered it for myself, that Miss Stipp is seated.