After the cart had driven away, Clemens said: “The patter of the costermonger, when you come to think of it, is really a language within the English language, and one might do worse than give it printed tongue—i. e., raise it above the merely occasional use British writers accord it. I want to look into that costermongery,” he continued. “See if you can’t find, hire or steal some coster chap worth listening to, some one who knows the patter with all the trimmings.” And at his door he added: “Get an ‘Arriet,’ for the ‘Arry’s’ are too tough.”
A week or two later Herbert Beerbohm Tree found us such a patter artist among the employees of Her Majesty’s Theatre—a scrub lady—and here follow some of the stories she told us, corrected and amended by Mark, who cut out coster words not generally understood.
MARK AND THE COSTERMONGERS
That Beautiful Funeral
Two Girls Meeting at the Corner of a Street.
“Hullo, I didn’t know you had moved up this way again. Who are you in black for?”
“Stepfather. Thank Gowd! he was a reg’lar log on the fambly’s leg. Kept a-ebbing and a-flowing and wouldn’t die. But you know when we moved to ’Ampsted, that settled him. Those flu winds it was as took ’im off.
“We ’ad a postmortem and everything on ’im, and when they opened ’im you know they found he had two ulsters in his inside and there was ’aricot veins in his legs too. But it was the influential winds that took ’im off, real.
“Of course Mother ’ad ’im insured in all sorts of places. So, poor man, he real paid for all this beautiful mourning we are having on him. We all dress alike in this beautiful black.
“On the funeral day we had all our cousins up from up-country and we had such a beautiful funeral and such a swell party atter. We had a hotch-bone of beef and blanmanges and jellies and cakes and tarts, and by Gowd! we did enjoy ourselves.