They were well-built, and calculated to bear even Mrs. Pinchbeck. "Vermilion red was his favourite colour," she said, "and he thought the bright yellow of the nails livened them up. They had been made a good many years, but he sometimes gave them a fresh coat of paint."
Pinchbeck and she had been married many years; they had no children. They lived by themselves, and he was a very good husband. But there were other wonders in the room beside the poor woman and the brilliant furniture, and they soon claimed attention.
In front of me stood a monumental cross some feet in height, and made apparently of brown marble. The cross stood on three foundation steps of brown marble, and at intervals round the body of the cross were bands of yellow ribbon.
She saw me looking at it. "That's all tobacco," she said; "it is made of cigar-ends." There was a descriptive paper attached to the cross. "Jonathan collected the cigar-ends, and he made them into that monument, and he made the calculations in his head, and I wrote them down," she said, referring to the paper. "He walked more than ninety thousand miles to collect the cigar-ends," she said. I asked permission to read the descriptive paper attached, and after permission—for I saw the whole thing was sacred to the suffering woman—I detached it. I was lost in interest as I read the paper, which was well written, and contained some curious calculations. I found on inquiry that Jonathan could neither read nor write, but he could, as she said, "calculate in his own head."
The document consisted of a double sheet of foolscap, which was covered on the four pages with writing and figures in a woman's hand. Briefly it told of the great deeds of Jonathan, who, as I have previously said, was a dock-labourer. He had lived in Clapton Park for more than thirty years, and he had walked every day to and from the East London Docks, a five-mile tramp every morning, and a return journey at night of equal length. Hundreds of times his journey had been fruitless, so far as getting a day's work was concerned; but, like an industrious bee, Jonathan returned home every night laden with what to him was sweeter than honey—cigar-ends that he had gathered from the pavements, gutters, and streets he traversed and searched during his daily ten-mile tramp. They lay before me, converted into a massive monumental cross, erected upon three great slabs of similar material. On each side of it stood a smaller cross, as if it were to show off the dimensions of the great cross. The paper stated that the whole of the cigar-ends collected weighed one hundredweight and three-quarters. It also told how far the cigars would have reached had they been placed end to end; one cigar was reckoned at three inches, four to a foot, twelve to a yard, and seven thousand and forty to a mile. The paper also told how much they cost at twopence each, how long they took to smoke at one half-hour each, also how much duty the Government had received on each at four shillings per pound. Thirty years of interminable tramping, with his eyes on the ground like a sleuth-hound, had Jonathan done. Hour after hour he had sat in his little home contemplating his collection, and making his mental calculations while his wife wrote them down, and then in its glory arose his great monument.
Handing the paper to Mrs. Pinchbeck, I proceeded to examine the cross. I felt it, and found it hard, solid, firm, and every edge square and sharp. I wondered how he had converted such unlikely materials as cigar-ends into such a solid piece of work. The poor woman told me that from all the cigar-ends he brought home he trimmed off the burnt ends, and carefully placed them in a dry place; then he made a great wooden frame, screwed together, the inside of which represented the cross. In this frame he arranged end-ways layer after layer of his cigar-ends, pressing them and even hammering them in; now and again he had poured in also a solution of treacle and water, placing more cigar-ends until it was pressed and hammered full. Then it was left for months to slowly dry. It was a proud day for the couple when the wooden frame was removed, and the great triumph of Jonathan's life stood before them.
But the tobacco cross did not by any means exhaust the wonders of the room. All round strange things were hanging from the ceiling, threaded on a string like girls thread beads and boys thread horse-chestnuts—rough, flat-looking things, about the size of a plate and of a dirty brown colour. "Whatever have you got there, hanging from the ceiling?" I said. The answer came in a hoarse whisper: "Tops and bottoms." Tops and bottoms! tops and bottoms! I looked at them, and cudgelled my brains to find out what tops and bottoms were. I had to give it up, and the hoarse whisper came again: "Tops and bottoms." There the "tops" hung like a collection of Indian scalps, and there hung the "bottoms" like a collection of burned pancakes. On examining one string of them, I found attached the inevitable paper, on which was written "1856."
"Oh," I said, "these are the tops and bottoms of your bread. Why did you cut your bread in that way?" "It was Jonathan's fancy," she said. It might have been her husband's idea, but she had entered heartily into it, for she had saved the crusts from all their loaves; she had written the papers and particulars that were attached to them, and she was proud of the old crusts, some of which dated from the time of the Crimean War. I was prepared for other strange whims after my experience with the vermilion furniture, the tobacco cross, and the "tops and bottoms," and it was well that I was, for other revelations awaited me. I found a great bundle of sugar papers—coarse, heavy papers, some blue, others grey—neatly folded, tied together, and tabulated. These were the wrappers that had contained all the sugar the worthy couple had bought during their married life. A document attached gave particulars of their weight, told also of how much they had been defrauded by the purchase of paper and not sugar, told the price of sugar in various years, and the variations of their losses. Next to these stood a pile of tea-wrappers, tabulated and ticketed in exactly the same manner. Mr. and Mrs. Pinchbeck had evidently a just cause of complaint against the grocers.
I cannot possibly reveal the whole contents of the room. Had a local auctioneer been called in to make a correct inventory, he would surely have fled in despair. Every available square inch of the room was fully occupied with strange objects. In one corner was a pile of nails—cut nails and wrought nails, French nails and old "tenpenny" nails, barndoor nails and dainty wire nails—collected from the streets during Jonathan's long life. They told the industrial history of those years, and spoke eloquently of the improvement that had taken place even in nail-making. They told, too, of the poor home-workers of Cradley Heath, and of the women and children who had made them. Beside the nails was a heap of screws—poor old blunted rusty things, made years before Mr. Chamberlain introduced his improved pointed screws, lying mingled with the Screws of present use, bright, slender, and genteel. Here was a heap of shoe-tips, some of which had done duty forty years ago in protecting the heels and toes of cumbrous boots that had stumbled and resounded on the cobble-stone streets of those days. They, too, had a tale to tell, for Blakey's protectors lay there mingled with old, heavy, rusty tips that had protected "wooden shoon" in the days of long ago.
Decidedly, Jonathan was a modern Autolycus, a "snapper-up of unconsidered trifles." He had almost established a corner in hairpins. There they were, six hundred thousand of them, neatly arranged in starch boxes, nicely oiled to prevent rust, box after box of them, every box weighed and counted, the whole lot weighing, so the descriptive paper says, two and a half hundredweight: hairpins from St. James's and Piccadilly—for Jonathan, when work was scarce, had on special occasions searched with magnetic eye the El Dorado of the West—hairpins from the narrow streets of the East; hairpins from suburban thoroughfares; hairpins from the pavements of the City; old, massive hairpins that would almost have tethered a goat; demure, slender hairpins that would nestle snugly in the hair, and adapt themselves comfortably to the head; hairpins plain and hairpins corrugated—there they lay.