“When I first went to Wells-street, I did pretty well, because there was a dress-maker’s at the corner, and I used to get a good deal from the carriages that stopped before the door. I used to take five or six shillings in a day then, and I don’t take so much in a week now. I tell you what I made this week. I’ve made one-and-fourpence, but it’s been so wet, and people are out of town; but, of course, it’s not always alike—sometimes I get three-and-sixpence or four shillings. Some people gives me a sixpence or a fourpenny-bit; I reckons that all in.
“I am dreadful tired when I comes home of a night. Thank God my other leg’s all right! I wish the t’other was as strong, but it never will be now.
“The police never try to turn me away; they’re very friendly, they’ll pass the time of day with me, or that, from knowing me so long in Oxford-street.
“My broom sometimes serves me a month; of course, they don’t last long now it’s showery weather. I give twopence-halfpenny a piece for ’em, or threepence.
“I don’t know who gives me the most; my eyes are so bad I can’t see. I think, though, upon an average, the gentlemen give most.
“Often I hear the children, as they are going by, ask their mothers for something to give to me; but they only say, ‘Come along—come along!’ It’s very rare that they lets the children have a ha’penny to give me.
“My mother is seventy the week before next Christmas. She can’t do much now; she does though go out on Wednesdays or Saturdays, but that’s to people she’s known for years who is attached to her. She does her work there just as she likes.
“Sometimes she gets a little washing—sometimes not. This week she had a little, and was forced to dry it indoors; but that makes ’em half dirty again.
“My father’s breath is so bad that he can’t do anything except little odd jobs for people down here; but they’ve got the knack now, a good many on ’em, of doin’ their own.
“We have lived here fifteen years next September; it’s a long time to live in such an old wilderness, but my old mother is a sort of woman as don’t like movin’ about, and I don’t like it. Some people are everlasting on the move.