“… barring his eccentricities.”
This ingenious person distributed a card embellished with flowers and insects, upon which was engraven the following advertisement:—
No. 1, Suffolk Street, Cockspur Street.
“Mrs. Dards begs leave to inform her friends in particular, and the public in general, that after a labour of thirty years, she has for their inspection and amusement opened an exhibition of shell-work, consisting of a great variety of beautiful objects equal to nature, which are minutely described in the catalogue. Likewise is enabled to gratify them
“With bones, scales, and eyes, from the prawn to the porpoise,
Fruit, flies, birds, and flowers, oh, strange metamorphose!”
“Open from ten to six in the summer,—from ten to four in the winter.
“Admittance 1s. Catalogue 6d.”
Mr. Jennings,[367] latterly known as Constantine Noel, barring his eccentricities, was an accomplished gentleman, a traveller of infinite taste, and one of the most liberal and entertaining companions imaginable. Mr. Noel’s figure was short, thin, and much bent by age; and he was very singular in his dress. The crown of his hat fitted his head as close as a pitch-plaster; his coat was short, of common cloth, and, like Mr. Wodhull’s, regularly buttoned up from his waist to his chin. His stockings were not striped blue and white, like those of Sir Thomas Stepney,[368] but of pepper-and-salt mixture, and of worsted. He stepped astride in consequence of the bowness of his legs, and generally attracted notice by striking his walking-stick hard on the stones with his right arm fully extended, while his left hung swinging low before him. He wore thick-sole shoes, with small buckles, and seldom showed linen beyond the depths of his stock.
My father, who knew him well, used to relate the annexed anecdote. Mr. Noel one day, when at the corner of Rathbone Place, close to Wright’s, the intelligent grocer, finding himself rather fatigued, called repeatedly to the first coachman, who, after laughing at him for some time, increased the insult by observing, “A coach, indeed! a coach! who’s to pay for it?”