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So in 1792, when the Prussians and the French refugees together invaded France, they never doubted for an instant that they should easily disperse the mob, as they were pleased to call it, of Kellermann's "vagabonds, cobblers, and tailors."
He filled his trunk with water of a dirty quality, and advancing toward them in his ordinary manner, spouted the whole of the puddle over them. The punishment was highly applauded by those who witnessed it, and the poor cobblers were laughed at for their pains. The Lion.
"If you weren't, I should regard that observation as an impertinence. I said the club, which is sufficient. They used to make you really excellent sherry cobblers there." "Well," said Devine, with his eyes twinkling, "I guess it is, and the name was half out when you stopped. I was naturally never inside the place in question, but I've been in Montreal.
But did not Sheridan make the same melancholy ending, and run the same fatal career, though in a higher and more brilliant circle? The affectation of the society of lords is as mean and low-minded as the love of that of cobblers and tapsters. It is that cobblers and tapsters may admire, that we wish to be seen in the company of their betters.
Altogether, they called for cocktails, smashes, toddies, cobblers, juleps, and legitimates. These disposed of, the company repaired to what is called a "box up-stairs." Scarcely seated, Master George rang the bell with such violence that he disjointed the cord and tassel, and gave such an alarm that three or four darkies came poking their alarmed countenances through the curtains at once.
On one side of the street a row of lofty gabled houses, built under Francis the First, sheltered persons of good condition; on the other, divided from these by the width of the road and a reeking kennel, a row of peat-houses, the hovels of cobblers and sausage-makers, leaned against shapeless timber houses which tottered upwards in a medley of sagging roofs and bulging gutters.
The tiny car stove that stood midway of one of the seats was all he needed in cold weather, and the seats along the sides were a continuous spread of cobblers' seats. He could cobble all the way up one side of the car and all the way back the other, and when he had customers waiting he always had a seat to give them.
There were other things, however, to which one could turn when the appetite grew more dainty; there were jellies, blancmange, chocolate cream, biscuit glace, peach ice, vanilla ice, orange-water ice, brandy peaches, preserved strawberries and pines; not to say a word of towers of candy, bonbons, kisses, champagne, Rhine wine, sparkling Catawba, liquors, and a man in the corner making sherry cobblers of wondrous flavour, under the especial supervision of Kinch; on the whole, it was an American supper, got up regardless of expense and whoever has been to such an entertainment knows very well what an American supper is.
He visited various houses in Gardener Street, Castle Street, Norway Street, making his way through backyards and up dark, narrow stairs, up to the garrets or down to the cellars. Over all was the same poverty; without exception the cobblers were lodged in the most miserable holes. He had not a single success to record.
Damp rotten houses, many to let, many yet building, many half-built and mouldering away lodgings, where it would be hard to tell which needed pity most, those who let or those who came to take children, scantily fed and clothed, spread over every street, and sprawling in the dust scolding mothers, stamping their slipshod feet with noisy threats upon the pavement shabby fathers, hurrying with dispirited looks to the occupation which brought them 'daily bread' and little more mangling-women, washer-women, cobblers, tailors, chandlers, driving their trades in parlours and kitchens and back room and garrets, and sometimes all of them under the same roof brick-fields skirting gardens paled with staves of old casks, or timber pillaged from houses burnt down, and blackened and blistered by the flames mounds of dock-weed, nettles, coarse grass and oyster-shells, heaped in rank confusion small dissenting chapels to teach, with no lack of illustration, the miseries of Earth, and plenty of new churches, erected with a little superfluous wealth, to show the way to Heaven.
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