The Mysteries of the Court of London — page 246: what you’re looking at

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

MR. SAMUEL EMANUEL 215 had learned from Mary Wright, and it was with a profound sympathy that the youth listened to his sister’s narrative. They had threaded several streets in their progress toward a point at which they purposed to take an omnibus, when Christian suddenly pressed his sister’s arm, and as she looked in the same direction on which his regards were fixed, she at once comprehended his meaning. There was the posse of ragged impostors, singing at the very top of their voices. The man had his hands thrust into the pockets of his dilapi- dated trousers, and his face was screwed up to as piteous an air of misery as could be well conceived. The woman, with mouth wide open, was gazing up into the air, dragging along a ragged urchin by each hand. A girl clung to the coat tails of the man, who passed as her father, and to her dress a little half-naked boy, scarcely five years of age, was holding on. On the right of the front rank, an impudent- looking minx of a girl, with an old cotton handkerchief about her head was staring up at a window and proffering a box of matches. In the rear an older girl and a boy — both with villainously hangdog countenances — were likewise doing their best to excite compassion. It needed but a partially scrutinizing glance to perceive that this tribe of children could, with scarcely any degree of possibility, belong to those who were passing themselves off as their parents, for not between any two of them was the slightest family simil- itude. There they were, slowly making their way along the street, singing at the top of their discordant voices; and when the song temporarily ceased, the man whined forth the same tale he had already told to Christian, with this trifling difference, however, that he happened to substitute Portsmouth for Liver- pool as the place whence he and his family had tramped up. Halfpence from the windows rattled down into the street; these were quickly snatched up by the children, who scudded about in all directions for the purpose. The man prayed “that the Lord might bless the kind ladies and gentlemen who thus assisted a poor mechanic out of employ,” the woman dropped divers low curtseys, and the singing re- commenced. It did not seem to strike the charitable donors as being at all strange that the poor family, though a few minutes before they had proclaimed themselves to be starv- ing, did not at once rush off to the nearest baker’s and buy ECORANICLOOO S (C(O)