The boots reinvigorated the pilgrim on his way to the ever-receding Mecca of employment, and each day he sallied forth further refreshed by the bread and butter and tea which William Gregson’s spouse dispensed after the sittings. All over London he tramped. One day he wandered in hopes of a job among the docks of Rotherhithe, feeling a vague romance in the great gray perspectives of towering wood-stacks with their far-away flavor of exotic forests, and in the sombre canals and locks along which men with cordwain faces were tugging discolored barges. The desolation of the scene and of the district was akin to his mood—his eyes were full of delicious hopeless tears; he rambled on, forgetting to ask for the job, through the forlorn streets, all ship-chandler shops and one-story cottages, and threading a narrow passage strewn with lounging louts, found himself on a little floating pier on the bank of the river, and lost himself again in contemplating the grimy picturesque traffic, the bleak wharves and warehouses.
“You see that air barge with the brick-dust sails?”
Matt started; an aged gentleman with a rusty silk hat was addressing him.
“Well, t’other day I see one just like that capsize in calm weather under my very eyes. I come here every day after dinner to watch the water, and I do get something worth seein’ sometimes. The pier-master he told me it was loaded with road-slop, and road-slop’s alive—shifts the weight on the lurchin’ side, you see, and that’s ’ow it occurred. There was two men drowned—oh! it’s worth while coming here sometimes, I can tell you. You see that green flag off the buoy?—that’s where she lays, right in the fairway of the river.”
Here the aged gentleman snuffed himself with tremulous fingers that spilled half, and offered Matt the box. The young man took a pinch for exhilaration.
A strayed sparrow hopped dolefully amid the grains of snuff on the floating platform in futile quest of seeds.
“It would be ’appier stuffed,” the aged gentleman declared. “I mean with tow, not toke.” And he laughed wheezingly.
Matt contesting this, the aged gentleman maintained, with an air of deep philosophy, that all birds would be ’appier stuffed—that their life in a state of nature was a harrowing competition for crumbs and worms, while to keep them alive in cages was the climax of cruelty.
It subsequently transpired that he was a retired bird-stuffer, and the conversation ended in Matt’s accompanying him home to learn the process, as the bird-stuffer’s son and heir in far-off Stepney was in need of a trustworthy hand in the shop.
“There isn’t a honest ’art in the trade,” he said, gloomily, “and the boys are wuss than the men. They ought to be stuffed. What I like about you is that you’ve got no character. The better the character the wuss the man. They takes advantage of it.”