“P’raps it is; but there’s a good deal of difference, mind you. In England (I have been a’most all over it) a feller in my line is a wagabon. He don’t take no standing in society. He may be quiet, never get into no trouble, and never give nobody else none; but
that don’t help him. ‘He gits his livin’ in the streets,’ they say, and that’s enough. Well, ’spose he does? he ’as to work tremenjus hard for it.”
“His certainly cannot be an idle life.”
“It just ain’t, if they’d only let us alone; but they won’t—them blessed Peelers I mean. How would you like it?” he continued, appealing to me with as hard a look in the face as if I had been his most implacable enemy, “how would you like it, if you had looked up a jolly good pitch, and a reg’lar good comp’ny was a looking on—at the west end, in a slap up street, where there ain’t no thoroughfare—and jist as you’re a doin’ the basin, and the browns is a droppin’ into the ’at, up comes a Peeler. Then it’s ‘Move on!’ You must go;” he stared harder than ever, and thumped his hand on the table; “I say you must go, and lose p’raps a pick up as ’u’d keep you for a week. How would you like that?”
“I should expostulate.”
“Spostallate!—would you?” a slight curl of the lip, expressive of contempt at my ignorance of the general behaviour of policemen. “Ah! if you say ’bo!’ to a Peeler he pulls you, and what’s the consequence? Why, a month at the Steel!”—which hard name I understood to be given to the House of Correction.
“But the police are not unreasonable,” I suggested.
“Well, p’raps some of ’em ain’t,” he remarked, “but you can’t pick out your policemen, that’s where it is.”
“Do the police never interfere with you here?” I asked.
“They used to it; and I’ve had to beg back my traps more than once from the borough of the Police Correctionell, as they call it; but then that was ’cause I was hignorant of the law. When they see that I could git a ’onest living, an old cove in a cocked hat ses he to me, ses he, ‘You’re a saltimbanc, you are. Wery good. You go to the borough of police for public morals, and the minister (not a parson, mind you, but the ’ed hinspector), if he’s satisfied with your character he’ll give you a ticket.”