| "The story of our Lives from Year to Year"
All the Year Round | ||
| No. 4. New Series. | Saturday, December 26, 1868. | Price Twopence. |
Wrecked in Port.
A Serial Story by the Author of "Black Sheep."
Chapter VI.Bread Seeking.
There are few streets in London better known to that large army of martyrs, the genteelly-poor, than those which run northward from the Strand, and are lost in the two vast tracts of brick known under the names of Covent-garden and Drury-lane. Lodging-house keepers do not affect these streets, preferring the narrow no-thorough-fares on the other side of the Strand, abutting on the river; streets eternally ringing with the hoarse voice of the costermonger, who descends on one side and ascends on the other; eternally echoing to the grinding of the organ-man, who gets through his entire répertoire twice over during his progress to the railing overlooking the mudbank, and his return to the pickle-shop at the top; eternally haunted by the beer-boy and the newspaper-boy, by postmen infuriated with wrongly addressed letters, and by luggage-laden cabs. In the streets bearing northward no costermonger screams and no organ is found; the denizens are business-people, and would very soon put a stop to any such attempt. Business, and nothing but business, in that drab-coloured house with the high wire blinds in the window, over which you can just catch a glimpse of the top of a hanging white robe. Cope and Son are the owners of the drab-coloured house, and Cope and Son are the largest retailers of clerical millinery in London. All day long members of "the cloth," sleek, pale, emaciated, high church curates; stout, fresh-coloured, huge-whiskered, broad church rectors; fat, pasty-faced, straight-haired evangelical ministers, are pouring into Cope and Son's for clothes, for hoods, for surplices, for stoles, for every variety of ecclesiastical garment. Cope and Son supply all, in every variety, for every sect; the M.B. waistcoat and stiff-collared coat reaching to his heels in which the Honourable and Reverend Cyril Genuflex looks so imposing, as he, before the assembled vestry, defies the scrutiny of his evangelical churchwarden; the pepper-and-salt cutaway in which the Reverend Pytchley Quorn follows the hounds; the black stuff gown in which the Reverend Locock Congreve perspires and groans as he deals out denunciations of those sitting under him; and the purple bedgown, turned up with yellow satin, and worked all over with crosses and vagaries, in which poor Tom Phoole, such a kind-hearted and such a soft-headed vessel, goes through his ritualistic tricks—all these come from the establishment of Cope and Son's, in Rutland-street, Strand. The next house on the right is handy for the high church clergymen, though the evangelicals shut their eyes and turn away their heads as they pass by it. Here Herr Tubelkahn, from Elberfeld, the cunning worker in metals, the artificer of brass and steel and iron, and sometimes of gold and silver, the great ecclesiastical upholsterer, has set up his lares and penates, and here he deals in the loveliest of mediævalisms and the choicest of renaissance wares. The sleek long-coated gentry who come to make purchases can scarcely thread their way through the heterogeneous contents of Herr Tubelkahn's shop. All massed together without order; black oaken chairs, bought up by Tubelkahn's agents from occupants of tumbledown old cottages in midland districts; crosiers and crucifixes, ornate and plain, from Elberfeld; sceptres and wands from Solingen, lecterns in the
