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The genial neighbourhood of the oven caused him no inconvenience. They flaunt and forage in the Lines, they inspect the ashpits and cookhouses, they wheel and manoeuvre on the parades, but Slyboots sat serene upon his poker. He had a cookhouse all to himself.... He died. We must all die; but we need not all die of repletion, which I fear, was his case.
He earned his living as a sandwich man, or by carrying in coals, or by going errands, or by emptying ashpits. He could neither read nor write, but he remembered a number and never forgot what was due to him, and the solitary subject on which he spoke was the wonders of London, where it was supposed he had lost such reason as he had at once possessed.
But it is not every man who possesses technical knowledge of this kind, or who can turn his hand to several things. Imagine a town surrounded by two or three thousand such small occupiers, let them be never so clever; where would the extra employment come from; where would be the ashpits to empty? Where one could do well, a dozen could do nothing.
The career of our play brought us through the dark muddy lanes behind the houses where we ran the gauntlet of the rough tribes from the cottages, to the back doors of the dark dripping gardens where odours arose from the ashpits, to the dark odorous stables where a coachman smoothed and combed the horse or shook music from the buckled harness.
Their kitchen battery consists exclusively of old metal cases of preserved fruit or meats that they have picked up from the ashpits. The majority, but by no means all, have got hold, somehow, of some old stoves or the scraps of a stove that they have put together as best they could.
On the sides of the vast ashpits long lines of "boys," toiling like ants up steep inclines, were carrying rush-baskets full of rubbish on their shoulders. Yet these ignorant fellahin were playing their part, and an indispensable one, in laying bare to modern eyes the history of the world's first civilization.
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