“Ah, then,” said the big Irishman, with a look of pity when Bob showed him his bleeding hand, “your sodgerin’ days is over, me boy.”
And so they were. At the close of the war our Corporal retired from the service with a small pension, leaving two fingers behind him!
Chapter Six.
One very cold but calm and clear winter night, a lame man was seen to hurry along the Strand in the direction of Saint Paul’s Cathedral. The man was clothed in a thick greatcoat, and wore a shawl round his neck, which muffled him up to the very eyes. Indeed, the said shawl would have gone quite over his eyes if it had not been for his fine Roman nose, which stuck out over it, and held it firmly down.
The man’s lameness was only a limp. It did not prevent him from walking very fast indeed. He was evidently bent on business; nevertheless, the business was not so pressing but that he could stop now and then to look at anything that interested him in the crowded streets.
And how crowded they were—and cheerful too: for it was Christmastide, and people seemed to be more excited and hearty than usual. The shops were resplendent—filled to overflowing with everything that could tempt man to spend money, and blazing with gas-light, so that the streets seemed even brighter than at noon. The poulterers’ shops, in particular, were so stuffed, that rows of fat geese and ducks, apparently finding the crush too much for them inside, seemed to have come outside the shops and hung themselves up round the doors and windows!
The lame man did not linger long, however, but hurried onwards until he reached that quarter of the city near to the Bank of England, where very poor and wretched people lived upon wondrously little of that gold which lay in such huge quantities so near them.
In the back slums of this region there were no bright gas-lights. The shops were ill-lighted and miserable, like the population, except a few at the corners of streets, where rough men and ragged women, and even children, went to poison themselves with gin.