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A great many novels of the day are extremely vulgar, because they describe ill-bred people and represent them to the reader as ladies and gentlemen. But Dickens' shopkeeper or street-sweeper makes no pretence to gentility, and therefore is as far from being vulgar as the man who has never known what it was to be any thing but a gentleman.
"No, they're not my folks," replied the boy, with a touch of bitterness in his voice. "Well, Archer when you get home, you wash your face, do! It's so dirty!" The boy flushed hotly. If one of his companions had said that to him, he would have knocked him down instantly. But he forgave everything this little girl said, because she was so beautiful and so kind. "I am a street-sweeper, miss."
It was not at first borne in upon her to believe that Captain Mountjoy Scarborough, an officer in the Coldstreams, and the acknowledged heir to the Tretton property, had vanished away as a stray street-sweeper might do, or some milliner's lowest work-woman. But at last there were advertisements in all the newspapers and placards on all the walls, and Mrs.
The white-haired street-sweeper of Ansbach, who willingly left his broom to guide them to the house of the sacristan, might have been a street-sweeper in Vicenza; and the old sacristan, when he put his velvet skull-cap out of an upper window and professed his willingness to show them the chapel, disappointed them by saying "Gleich!" instead of "Subito!"
Everybody was in military uniform, everybody was shrugging his shoulders, and everybody was in the condition of a London policeman were he to see himself marched off to the station by a street-sweeper.
At first he had written his father and his mother regularly, but now he found it difficult to write them at all. Toward the middle of the fourth week Jimmy had reached a point where he applied for a position as office-boy. "I'll be damned if I'm going to quit," he said to himself, "if I have to turn street-sweeper.
Gudule burst into tears, but kept silent. Prayers and menaces had no effect. Madame Cornouiller made a long and circumstantial inquiry. She adroitly questioned her neighbors and tradespeople, the gardener, the street-sweeper, the gendarmes; nothing put her on the track of the culprit. She tried again to obtain from Gudule a complete confession.
'I do try to keep before me what she said about Job when it comes burning before me, why should that man be at large, and I here? or when I think how his serpent-eye fell under mine when I tried that one word about the receipt, that would save my life. Oh! that receipt! 'Better to be here than in his place, after all! 'I'd rather be a street-sweeper! bitterly began Leonard. 'Oh, Dr.
The baron halted; he thought awhile; his faded face took on that expression of roguery which the French call polissonnerie; joyousness seized him. "We will shoot off!" cried he; and he made a movement with his foot like that which a street-sweeper makes to catch a bark shoe thrown up in the air. Maryan rose, shook himself out of his lethargy, and said, almost with delight: "It is an idea.
Time was, it is said, when the profession of a street-sweeper in London was a certain road to competence and fortune when the men of the brooms were men of capital; when they lived well, and died rich, and left legacies behind them to their regular patrons. These palmy days, at any rate, are past now.
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