"Kin yer write a letter?"
"More or less," I said. I did not rate myself with Madame de Staël nor with Edward Fitzgerald, but I forebore to mention these names because I thought that they would not be familiar to my questioner. If you happen to know Paradise Rents, Fulham, you will realise that neither Madame de Staël, nor Fitzgerald is much read there. Moreover, the type that addressed me had not the aspect of a literary man.
He was a man of some seven years, maybe, in company with a younger man, perhaps of five. He was hatless, coatless, waistcoatless, but he had a pair of trousers, short in the leg, precariously held by one brace. That is the fashion in Paradise Rents. I had come upon these two young men about Fulham as they were staring with absorbed interest into the undertaker's shop advantageously situated for custom at the corner of the Rents and the main street. Certainly it was a pleasant window. Besides the legends and texts, the artificial wreaths and the pictures of tombs and tombstones, there was a number of model coffins in miniature. It was these that had fascinated the attention of the two young men.
"I should like one o' them to ply with," said the elder covetously.
"What would yer do with it, Bill?" the younger asked.
"I'd put the old Kayser in it, along wi' Farver."
It is rude to laugh at other people's conversation, particularly if you have not been introduced to them, but I caught myself in an audible chuckle over this fine blend of patriotic and filial sentiment. Then I pulled myself but not in time; I had been detected.
If you wish to know what it is to be stared at, you should interrupt, as I had, a conversation between two young men of about this age in Fulham or elsewhere. They stared in unison and in silence until the tension became unbearable, and one of them, the elder, whose name was Bill, relieved it with the above quest on, "Kin yer write a letter?"
Perhaps my answer was a little modest. He regarded me doubtfully, then asked—
"'Ow soon kin yer write a letter?"