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After which a connection, James Lamert by name, who had lived with the family before they moved from Camden Town to Gower Street, and was manager of a worm-eaten, rat-riddled blacking business, near old Hungerford Market, offered to employ the lad, on a salary of some six shillings a week, or thereabouts.
His bills for articles received from Paris, such as perfumery, cravats, jewelry, patent blacking, and clothes, ran to another twelve hundred francs. Add to this the groom, or tiger, the horses, a very superior style of dress, and six hundred francs a year for rent, and you will see a grand total of three thousand francs.
The following morning opens with a white frost, the road is level and good, and the yadoya people see that I am provided with a substantial breakfast in good season. My boots, I find, have been cleaned even. They were cleaned with a rag, O-hanna apologizing for the absence of shoe-brushes and blacking in pidgeon English: "Brush no have got."
He couldn't make up his mind to stoop to blacking boots and cleaning spittoons. He had always lived with aristocrats. He felt himself one to his finger tips. There was but one thing he could do that seemed to be needed up here. He could handle tobacco. He could stem the leaf. He had learned that at Arlington in helping Ben superintend the curing of the weed for the servants' use.
The blacking went streaming down over her face, white robe, and person, and left her looking more like a bronze fury than one of Eve's most charming daughters. A yard or more of the carpet was ruined, the wallpaper and bedclothes spattered, and the poor victim was unfit to be seen for a week at least.
The boot-black drew a tin putty blower from his pocket, took unerring aim, and nailed in a single shot the minute hand to the dial. Going on with his blacking, yet stopping ever and anon to glance over the General's plan of campaign, spread on the table before him, he was at last interrupted by the entrance of an officer. "Everything is ready for the attack, General. It is now eight o'clock."
"Bat'dlagoule, you've forgot blacking for coffin!" The apprentice made the correction without deigning reply, and then went on Livres. Sols. Farth. The apprentice stopped. "That's all," he said. There was a furious leer on the face of the Master of Burials. So, after all his care, apprentices would never learn to make mistakes on his side.
There is that old beggar Poiret, who goes without blacking altogether; he would sooner drink it than put it on his boots. Then there is that whipper-snapper of a student, who gives me a couple of francs. Two francs will not pay for my brushes, and he sells his old clothes, and gets more for them than they are worth. Oh! they're a shabby lot!"
It was our Owner that set us to our work, and if He tells us to black shoes, let us black them with all the pith of our elbows, and with the best blacking and brushes we can find; and if He sets us to work, which people think is more important and more conspicuous, let us do that too, in the same spirit, and for the same end.
It was broad daylight when he got back, and he crawled into bed without any one noticing anything of his attempted flight. Little Nikas had washed the blacking from his face and had put on his best clothes; he wanted to go to the market with a bundle of washing, which the butcher from Aaker was to take home to his mother, and Pelle walked behind him, carrying the bundle.
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