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Corydon has to cart the litter and thresh the barley, as well as to make love to Phillis; Ancillula has to dress and wash the nursery, to wait at breakfast and on her misses, to take the children out, etc., before she can have her brief sweet interview through the area-railings with Boopis, the policeman.
So, probably, 200 and 202 in Curzon Street might know what was going on in the house between them, the servants communicating through the area-railings; but Crawley and his wife and his friends did not know 200 and 202.
Frank stood still a moment, leaning against some area-railings they were in the distinguished quarter of Victoria Park Road and read the paragraph through. The clergyman watched him curiously. It seemed to him a very remarkable situation that he should be standing here in Victoria Park Road, giving information to a son as to his father's marriage.
She found him grinning over the bowl. She was discovered, and she blushed a little. "Thank you, Monseigneur," she said. "You see your ladies have been here. How good of you! I couldn't come before I was in the kitchen making a pudding." "I know you were, I saw you through the area-railings as I drove up," replied the old gentleman. "You see everything," she replied.
Blowser, the cook, who had come out of Devonshire with Mrs. But after the visit of Cavalcadour, the cook became quite discontented and uneasy in her mind. She talked in a melancholy manner over the area-railings to the cooks at twenty-three and twenty-five. She stepped over the way, and conferred with the cook there.
The steps were speckless as a newly laundered shirt, the brasses polished to the brilliancy of precious metal. His window-boxes He glanced along the fronts of his neighbors' houses; they hadn't put theirs out yet. His were ahead of everybody's; they made a cheerful splash of red, with their soldierly upstanding tulips, above the long serried line of area-railings. Again Ann's doing!
The cook is talking through the area-railings to the butcher-boy; a smart parlourmaid opens the door, and we see that the interior is as orderly, commonplace, and clean as we might expect at every house in the crescent. The floorcloths are irreproachable, the marble-painted walls are unadorned with a single picture.
I don't mean cousins from the country, love-stricken policemen, or gentlemen in mufti from Knightsbridge Barracks; but people who have an occult right on the premises; the uncovenanted servants of the house; gray women who are seen at evening with baskets flitting about area-railings; dingy shawls which drop you furtive curtsies in your neighborhood; demure little Jacks, who start up from behind boxes in the pantry.
But, if you see hurrying along a by-street, keeping as close as he can to the area-railings, a man of about forty or fifty, clad in an old rusty suit of threadbare black cloth which shines with constant wear as if it had been bees-waxed—the trousers tightly strapped down, partly for the look of the thing and partly to keep his old shoes from slipping off at the heels,—if you observe, too, that his yellowish-white neckerchief is carefully pinned up, to conceal the tattered garment underneath, and that his hands are encased in the remains of an old pair of beaver gloves, you may set him down as a shabby-genteel man.
The transition to the sport of window-breaking, and thence to the plundering of public-houses, was easy and natural. At last, after several hours, when sundry summer-houses had been pulled down, and some area-railings had been torn up, to arm the more belligerent spirits, a rumour got about that the Guards were coming.
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