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Crowl sent him up a cup of nice strong tea at tea-time, the brat who bore it found him lying dressed on the bed, snoring unbeautifully. The evening wore on. It was fine frosty weather. The Whitechapel Road swarmed with noisy life, as though it were a Saturday night. The stars flared in the sky like the lights of celestial costermongers. Everybody was on the alert for the advent of Mr. Gladstone.
Besides prowlers and idlers, we were mechanics, dock-labourers, costermongers, petty tradesmen, small clerks, milliners, stay-makers, shoe-binders, slop-workers, poor workers in a hundred highways and byways. Many of us on the whole, the majority were not at all clean, and not at all choice in our lives or conversation.
By day there was little traffic. Occasionally a long dray, on a gigantic pair of wheels, drawn by a long string of white Normandy horses in single file, with blue harness and jangling bells, filled up the roadway. Costermongers trundled their barrows along with strange, unmusical cries.
Drury Lane was now at the height of its business: flaring gas-jets flamed at the open shop-fronts, whilst tradesmen and costermongers seemed to vie with each other as to which could shout the loudest to attract customers.
He was no longer in the army, he was married and already had two little children. He and his wife earned their living as costermongers in the market-place. His room was poor, but bright and clean. He made me sit down, set the samovar, sent for his wife, as though my appearance were a festival for them. He brought me his children: “Bless them, Father.” “Is it for me to bless them?
The big baskets of the market porters passed along slowly, above the heads of the throng. Retail dealers, costermongers, and greengrocers were making their purchases in haste. Corporals and nuns clustered round the mountains of cabbages, and college cooks prowled about inquisitively, on the look-out for good bargains.
It was as though an invisible line of demarcation had been drawn between the lower and upper portion of the street, and held inviolate by the residents of each portion. There were no public houses or fish-shops in Sherryman Street; no organ-grinders, costermongers, unclean children, or women in black shawls.
Here we lay for five or six weeks, during which time the inhabitants made many excursions from the city especially on Sundays, to inspect our army, swarms of costermongers likewise visiting us every day with wine, spirits, bread, meat, fish, and fruit of every description for sale.
Since this offer was made, a very decided improvement has been noticed among the donkeys of the London costermongers, as if the competition for the first prize was to be a very large one. It will be a kind of St. Crispin's Day to the whole of the long- eared race a day of emancipation from forty centuries of obloquy and oppression.
The same persevering energy, directed by sound judgment and practical business talent, was conspicuously displayed by Miss Adaline Cooper, in her efforts for the improvement of the condition and morals of the costermongers of Tothill Fields, Westminster. Among the degraded, they as a class were regarded as the most degraded.
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