The Steam-Packet: A Tale of the River and the Ocean — page 308: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THE STEAM PACKET. 235 him to our readers, the only person in his apartment. His landlady was there also, busily engaged in laying the table with a broken cup, a basin with soft sugar, milk in a tumbler, butter upon paper, and a hot roll upon nothing. She was an Englishwoman who gained an honest and decent livelihood in Calais, .‘‘ by going out a-charin’.”’ She was fat, and red-faced, surmounted bya dirty cap richly bedizened with red and yellow ribands, from beneath which straggled.a few locks of deep-red hair. Her eyes were once of a bright aqua-marine colour, and her nose, doubtless, had been once well formed, although that fact can only be ascertained from tradition, from the circumstance of its having been crushed in flat with her face. Her teeth were white and strong, with the exception of the two front ones, which were missing, probably having retired at the same time that her nose changed its condition. Mrs. Snork (for that was this excellent lady’s name)-was_participat- ing in the feelings of gloom and perplexity which weighed so heavily upon the spirits of her master; for she too was silent, biting her lips, and occasionally her nails, with an expression of mingled vexation and anxiety, as she lingered over her domestic duties, Mr. Latitat at intervals raised his eyes towards her face, with an air of investigation and deference—as if desirous. of arriving at the result of her deliber- ations before venturing to express his own. . At length, catching a long sigh, he said, “‘ Well, if this don’t turn up a trump, d me if I shall know what dodge to be after next !” ‘¢ I’m blest if I must.n’t have tin some how or other,” said the lady with unfeeling-abruptness of manner. ‘‘ Here am I a goin’ on for six- teen veeks, and not a mag yet. Then my poor dear child ill too! and my sickliest child too! I wouldn’t ha’ cared had it been the hump-back, or the infant with the scald head—I could ha’ borne it; but for it to be the von as was born in sich a marvellous vay, jist von year and . three days after the death of poor Mr. Snork, and me as wirtuous a voman as any youd vish for to meet— ‘that’s the cause o’ aggrawation ! It’s my phernomenonas is attacked. He had got through the mumps, and the measles, and the hooping-cough, and his double teeth _ * And the small-pox, too, I think Iheard you say, Mrs. Snork,” ob- served Mr. Latitat deferentially. s¢ And warn’t subject to fits nayther,” continued Mrs. Snork; ‘ and yet was so wery sickly, without my being afeard of his dying. It was — a? an uncommon tough child, it were. It was as tough as—as—as—— “¢ As Jonah,” suggested the lawyer. ‘¢ Was he tough?” asked the charwoman—‘“ wery tough ?”’ ““To be sure he. was,” replied Mr. Latitat. ‘‘ Didn’t a whale try three whole days to digest him, and couldn't ?”’ Gomicbooks (E(0)