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"By the way, that is her half-sister, Marie Deschamps, who sings in your cousin's operas at the London Diana." "I have made the acquaintance of Marie a harmless little thing!" "Her half-sister isn't quite so harmless. She is the daughter of a Spanish mother, while Marie is the daughter of an English mother, a Cockney woman.
Well done, Ruth! One would think you were quite a Cockney." Uncle Reuben did not come home to his dinner; and his granddaughter said she had strictest orders never to expect him. Therefore we had none to dine with us, except the foreman of the shop, a worthy man, named Thomas Cockram, fifty years of age or so.
I had not been long at my post when the crowds concentrating on the line of march, coming up the avenue from the Embankment, began to shove intolerably from the rear, and it was as much as I could do to keep my place, particularly in view of the fact that the undersized cockney who stood in front of me appeared to offer no resistance to the pressure of my waistcoat against his narrow little back.
That a man of refined sentiments, elegant tastes, wide cultivation, and humane and tender genius, given, moreover, to indulgences in "Reveries" and the "Dream-Life," should succeed in the real business of agriculture, seemed a monstrous supposition to those cockney idealists who consider the cultivation of the mind incompatible with the cultivation of the ground, who cannot bring, by any theory of the association of ideas, practical talent into neighborly good-will with lofty aspirations, and who necessarily connect the government of brutes with an imbruted intelligence.
On a Sunday afternoon in a sub-suburb of a Kensington suburb I saw, passing through a drab, sad side street, a little Cockney man with the sketchy nose and unfinished features of his breed. He was presumably going to church, for he carried a large Testament under his arm. He wore, among other things, a pair of white spats, a long-tailed coat and a high hat.
He then alludes to the "cockney" improvements that had lately taken place, among which the venerable castle appears, like "A helmet on a Macaroni's head Or like old Talbot, turn'd into a fop, With coat embroider'd and scratch wig at top." Some verses, of the same mixed character, on the short duration of life and the changes that death produces, thus begin:
He shook his head. "I have never been in London before to-day," he answered. "More fool you to come, then," she said, shortly. "You don't look like a Cockney. I guess you're a gentleman, aren't you run away from home or something?" "I have come to live in London," he said, evasively. "I have always wanted to." She shook her head. "You'd better have stopped away. You are young, and you look good.
And, as a wealthy cockney once remarked to me in Brown's Tract, "It's no place for a poor man." And now I will give my reasons for preferring the clinker-built cedar boat, or canoe, to any other. First, as to material. Cedar is stronger, more elastic, more enduring and shrinks less than pine or any other light wood used as boat siding.
"Where will us wear it?" enquired a gigantic Yorkshireman, from the next stretcher. "Wherever you was 'it, lad!" replied the Cockney humourist. "At that rate," comes the rueful reply, "I shall 'ave to stand oop to show mine!" But now R.A.M.C. orderlies are at hand, and the symposium comes to an end.
One may get a little tired of marble Crusaders, with their crossed legs and broken noses, especially if, as one sometimes finds them, they are covered with the pencilled autographs of cockney scribblers. But there are monuments in this cathedral which excite curiosity, and others which awaken the most striking associations.
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