“Billy” is the popular name of the man who for many years has swept the long crossing that cuts off one corner of Cavendish-square, making a “short cut” from Old Cavendish-street to the Duke of Portland’s mansion.
Billy is a merry, good-tempered kind of man, with a face as red as a love-apple, and cheeks streaked with little veins.
His hair is white, and his eyes are as black and bright as a terrier’s. He can hardly speak a sentence without finishing it off with a moist chuckle.
His clothes have that peculiar look which arises from being often wet through, but still they are decent, and far above what his class usually wear. The hat is limp in the brim, from being continually touched.
The day when I saw Billy was a wet one, and he had taken refuge from a shower under the Duke of Portland’s stone gateway. His tweed coat, torn and darned, was black about the shoulders with the rain-drops, and his boots grey with mud, but, he told me, “It was no good trying to keep clean shoes such a day as that, ’cause the blacking come off in the puddles.”
Billy is “well up” in the Court Guide. He continually stopped in his statement to tell whom my Lord B. married, or where my Lady C. had gone to spend the summer, or what was the title of the Marquis So-and-So’s eldest boy.
He was very grateful, moreover, to all who had assisted him, and would stop looking up at the ceiling, and God-blessing them all with a species of religious fervour.
His regret that the good old times had passed, when he made “hats full of money,” was unmistakably sincere; and when he had occasion to allude to them, he always delivered his opinion upon the late war, calling it “a-cut-and run affair,” and saying that it was “nothing at all put alongside with the old war, when the halfpence and silver coin were twice as big and twenty times more plentiful” than during the late campaign.
Without the least hesitation he furnished me with the following particulars of his life and calling:—
“I was born in London, in Cavendish-square, and (he added, laughing) I ought to have a title, for I first came into the world at No. 3, which was Lord Bessborough’s then. My mother went there to do her work, for she chaired there, and she was took sudden and couldn’t go no further. She couldn’t have chosen a better place, could she? You see I was born in Cavendish-square, and I’ve worked in Cavendish-square—sweeping a crossing—for now near upon fifty year.