The Mysteries of the Court of London — page 367: what you’re looking at

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

336 REYNOLDS’ WORKS clothes’ shop, for you to turn out swell on Sundays, I’m lost in admiration at my own generosity.” ‘“ But you make us stick to the rags, though, during the veek-days,’’ observed Bill Scott, glancing somewhat sul- lenly down at his dirty and tattered attire. ‘Well, and don’t I stick to my own seedy togs during the veek? ’’ demanded the Burker, indignantly, and then, as if to compose his feelings, he imbibed half the contents of the pewter pot, having done which, he handed the vessel to Bill Scott. ‘I tell you what it is, young feller, if we was all three to turn out every day into Swell Street, it would regularly spile us for useful work. There’s no gam- mon about the business; we hav’n’t the gentility of cut that makes a chap fit for the swell mob. So we must continue to work on as we does. Look how I have blowed your hides out with good things ever since that affair of last veek; I hav’n’t stinted my share of the blunt, I hope. Coffee, hot rolls, and black puddings for breakfast, roast weal or pork, or else biled beef, carrots, and taters, from the slap- bang shop for dinner, sassengers or eel-pies, and baked taters, for supper, with no end of malt and blue-ruin by way of lush. Now that’s what I call living, and if the lord mayor and all his aldermen can beat it, then I’m a Dutchman, which I wery well know I ain’t, ’cos why my father was a out an’ out true-bred Englishman. Ah, Bill, he was a highly respectable man, — he was. I’ve a right to be proud of his name, and I rewere his memory. He was in the priggin’ line for a matter of forty year, wisited foreign parts for the good of his country, and died there. Ah, he knowed what Botany Bay and Norfolk Island was. I tell yer what, Bill, he was like the monkey that had seen the world which you read of in the fable-book.”’ ‘And who was your mother?’’ asked Bill Scott. “I never heerd you speak a word about her.” ‘Well, she was respectable in her way, too,” answered the Burker, when he had refilled and lighted his pipe. ‘‘ She took in washing and stolen goods, and the latter was a pre- cious sight more lucrative than the former. When my father got lagged — which in plain English he did, so it cost him nuffin, you understand, to go abroad and see the world — ”’ ‘Well, when he was lagged, what then ? ”’ asked Bill Scott. , EGOMIIGIOOKS (CO)