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Here he is generally surrounded by an admiring throng of hostlers, stable-boys, shoe-blacks, and those nameless hangers-on that infest inns and taverns, and run errands, and do all kinds of odd jobs, for the privilege of battening on the drippings of the kitchen and the leakage of the tap-room.
Oh yes, to be sure, nearly as good as hiding your little sooty shoe-blacks in surplices! But, my dear Armie, I am so tired of edifying! Why should I never have any fun? Come, don't look so dismal. I'll spare five shillings for a gown for old Betty Grey, and if there's anything left out after the party, you shall have it for the surplices, and you'll be Roland Graeme in my tableau?"
Travellers of all descriptions, from all the cardinal points, were continually stopping at it; and to attend to their wants, and minister to their convenience, an army of servants, of one description or other, was kept; waiters, chambermaids, grooms, postillions, shoe-blacks, cooks, scullions, and what not, for there was a barber and hair-dresser, who had been at Paris, and talked French with a cockney accent; the French sounding all the better, as no accent is so melodious as the cockney.
He assured me that the barber whom he employs calls all his razors by the names of the swords of the paladins, and that the shoe-blacks give similar names to their brushes. If Pasquale's statements were at variance with other poetical versions of the story, they were, as might be expected, still more so with the prose authorities.
One of the features in the street population of this city which struck us were the shoe-blacks. Each is provided with a comfortable arm-chair and a newspaper. He slips his employer into the chair, hands him the paper to read, and then kneeling down, works away till he has polished the leather boots; for which his demand is a quarter of a dollar the smallest coin in circulation, it seemed to us.
"Why, look ye, Madam," answered the Captain, "as to your hair-pinchers and shoe-blacks, you may puff off their manners, and welcome; and I am heartily glad you like 'em so well: but as to me, since you must needs make so free of your advice, I must e'en tell you, I never kept company with any such gentry." "Come, ladies and gentlemen," said Mrs.
Shoe-blacks and such like vagabonds were his constant companions, and the only honest employment he ever pretended to was that of a hackney-coachman, which the brethren of the whip had taught him out of charity.
But the most sensible diminution is among the shoe-blacks, who stand in the carriage-way, and, with all their implements before them, range themselves along the edge of the very elevated trottoir or foot-pavement. The decrotteurs of the Pont Neuf were once reputed masters of the art: their foresight was equal to their dexterity and expedition.
High and low, counts, burgomasters, merchants, shop-keepers, servants, shoe-blacks, all were buying and selling tulips like mad.
At the present day, the decrotteurs or shoe-blacks still exercise their profession on the Pont Neuf and in other quarters; but, as a refinement of the art, there is also opened, at each of the principal entrances of the Palais du Tribunat, a cabinet de decrotteur, or small apartment, where you are invited to take a chair, and presented with the daily papers.
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