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Updated: May 14, 2025
If you don't run into this here port you'll have to beat about in the offing all night, or cast anchor in the streets, for I don't know of another lodgin' in Portsm'uth w'ere you could hang out except them disrepitible grog-shops. In coorse, there's the big hotels; but I heerd you say to Sloper that you was bound to do things cheap, bein' hard up." "Never mind, my friend," said Miles quickly.
"Bless you!" as father would say, every one of them knew her and recognised her as a friend and fellow-comrade, for she would sing to them sometimes like a lark, which always set them all on the twitter; goldfinches, linnets, and bullfinches, of which mother kept a large stock, hopping about their cages trying by every means in their power to attract her notice on her entering the shop and coming near them; while the lemon-crested cockatoo, who was christened `Ally Sloper, on account of his fine flow of language, and a habit he had of ruffling up the feathers round his neck when spoken to, making him look as if he had a particularly high and stiff collar on, would shriek out `Say-rah! which was mother's name, just as if father were shouting for her to come downstairs in a sort of `reef topsails' on a stormy night sort of voice.
Interspersed with these sheets were others in which Sloper, the urban John Bull, had his fling with gin bottle and obese umbrella, or the kindly empty faces of the Royal Family appeared and reappeared, visiting this, opening that, getting married, getting offspring, lying in state, doing everything but anything, a wonderful, good-meaning, impenetrable race apart.
That "richer, riper look," that suggestion of a past, is there to-day, and is likely to be there tomorrow. The particular Sloper house is quite easy of identification. It is the third from the corner as one goes westward from the Avenue. In 1835, when Dr.
Lindsay Sloper, who owing, no doubt, to a great extent at least, to the letter of recommendation from Moscheles which he brought with him had got permission from Chopin to come for a lesson as often as he liked at eight o'clock in the morning, found the master at that hour not in deshabille, but dressed with the greatest care.
"Have ye any acquaintance with the laws which are made and purwided for British seamen when it happens that their flag's degraded by the haction of a retired tailor?" said old Joe. Mr. Sloper, instead of answering, cast a languishing eye at the river banks, which were fast sliding past, and requested to be set ashore. "It don't answer his purpose to speak to the pint," said Plum.
In fact, it was altogether too hot for the canvassers, and they came in from North and West and South, crippled and disheartened, to tender their resignations. To make matters worse, Sloper and Dodge had just got out a large Atlas of Australasia, and if they couldn't sell it, ruin stared them in the face; and how could they sell it without canvassers?
This was a settler for all of them; father leaning back in his chair and holding his sides, while mother and Jenny enjoyed the joke as much as we could both wish, `Ally Sloper' adding to the merriment of us all by shrieking out at intervals alternately, "Say-rah! Say-rah!" and "Blest if I don't have a smoke!" in father's very own voice.
"What! have they got hold o' Rattling Bill?" asked the former, as he drew the beer. "Ay, worse luck," returned Sloper. "I saw the sergeant as I came along lead him over to Miss Robinson's trap confound her!" "Don't you go fur to say anything agin Miss Robinson, old man," suddenly growled the big sailor, in a voice so deep and strong that it silenced for a moment the rest of the company.
Reports appeared in the country press about strange, gigantic birds that appeared at remote selections and frightened the inhabitants to death these were Sloper and Dodge's sober and reliable agents, wearing neat, close-fitting suits of tar and feathers.
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