The first home I visited was that of an old woman, who with the assistance of her son and girls, contrived to live in a most praiseworthy and comfortable manner. She and all her family were teetotallers, and may be taken as a fair type of the thriving costermonger.
As I ascended a dark flight of stairs, a savory smell of stew grew stronger at each step I mounted. The woman lived in a large airy room on the first floor (“the drawing-room” as she told me laughing at her own joke), well lighted by a clean window, and I found her laying out the savory smelling dinner looking most temptingly clean. The floor was as white as if it had been newly planed, the coke fire was bright and warm, making the lid of the tin saucepan on it rattle up and down as the steam rushed out. The wall over the fire-place was patched up to the ceiling with little square pictures of saints, and on the mantel-piece, between a row of bright tumblers and wine glasses filled with odds and ends, stood glazed crockeryware images of Prince Albert and M. Jullien. Against the walls, which were papered with “hangings” of four different patterns and colours, were hung several warm shawls, and in the band-box, which stood on the stained chest of drawers, you could tell that the Sunday bonnet was stowed safely away from the dust. A turn-up bedstead thrown back, and covered with a many-coloured patch-work quilt, stood opposite to a long dresser with its mugs and cups dangling from the hooks, and the clean blue plates and dishes ranged in order at the back. There were a few bushel baskets piled up in one corner, “but the apples smelt so,” she said, “they left them in a stable at night.”
By the fire sat the woman’s daughter, a pretty meek-faced gray-eyed girl of sixteen, who “was home nursing” for a cold. “Steve” (her boy) I was informed, was out working. With his help, the woman assured me, she could live very comfortably--“God be praised!” and when he got the barrow he was promised, she gave me to understand, that their riches were to increase past reckoning. Her girl too was to be off at work as soon as sprats came in. “Its on Lord Mayor’s-day they comes in,” said a neighbour who had rushed up to see the strange gentleman, “they says he has ’em on his table, but I never seed ’em. They never gives us the pieces, no not even the heads,” and every one laughed to their utmost. The good old dame was in high spirits, her dark eyes sparkling as she spoke about her “Steve.” The daughter in a little time lost her bashfulness, and informed me “that one of the Polish refugees was a-courting Mrs. M----, who had given him a pair of black eyes.”