“Hi! stop ’er!” roared the cabman.
“She’s down!” shouted the excited crowd.
“Tripped over ’er skirt,” explained the slatternly woman. “They do ’amper you.”
“No, she’s not. She’s up again!” vociferated a delighted plumber, with a sounding slap on his own leg. “Gor blimy, if she ain’t a good ’un!”
Fortunately the Square was tolerably clear and Johnny a good runner. Holding now his skirt and petticoat high in his left hand, Johnny moved across the Square at the rate of fifteen miles an hour. A butcher’s boy sprang in front of him with arms held out to stop him. The thing that for the next three months annoyed that butcher boy most was hearing shouted out after him “Yah! who was knocked down and run over by a lidy?” By the time Johnny reached the Strand, viâ Clement’s Inn, the hue and cry was far behind. Johnny dropped his skirts and assumed a more girlish pace. Through Bow Street and Long Acre he reached Great Queen Street in safety. Upon his own doorstep he began to laugh. His afternoon’s experience had been amusing; still, on the whole, he wasn’t sorry it was over. One can have too much even of the best of jokes. Johnny rang the bell.
The door opened. Johnny would have walked in had not a big, raw-boned woman barred his progress.
“What do you want?” demanded the raw-boned woman.
“Want to come in,” explained Johnny.
“What do you want to come in for?”
This appeared to Johnny a foolish question. On reflection he saw the sense of it. This raw-boned woman was not Mrs. Pegg, his landlady. Some friend of hers, he supposed.