The Uncommercial Traveller, page 29 by Charles Dickens
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instrument?'--'They would like to, very much; they would have an extraordinary interest in doing so.'--'And could none be got?'--'Well, a piano could even have been got for nothing, but these unfortunate dissensions--' Ah! better, far better, my Christian friend in the beautiful garment, to have let the singing boys alone, and left the multitude to sing for themselves! You should know better than I, but I think I have read that they did so, once upon a time, and that 'when they had sung an hymn,' Some one (not in a beautiful garment) went up into the Mount of Olives.
It made my heart ache to think of this miserable trifling, in the streets of a city where every stone seemed to call to me, as I walked along, 'Turn this way, man, and see what waits to be done!' So I decoyed myself into another train of thought to ease my heart. But, I don't know that I did it, for I was so full of paupers, that it was, after all, only a change to a single pauper, who took possession of my remembrance instead of a thousand.
'I beg your pardon, sir,' he had said, in a confidential manner, on another occasion, taking me aside; 'but I have seen better days.'
'I am very sorry to hear it.'
'Sir, I have a complaint to make against the master.'
'I have no power here, I assure you. And if I had--'
'But, allow me, sir, to mention it, as between yourself and a man who has seen better days, sir. The master and myself are both masons, sir, and I make him the sign continually; but, because I am in this unfortunate position, sir, he won't give me the counter- sign!'
CHAPTER IV
--TWO VIEWS OF A CHEAP THEATRE
As I shut the door of my lodging behind me, and came out into the streets at six on a drizzling Saturday evening in the last past month of January, all that neighbourhood of Covent-garden looked very desolate. It is so essentially a neighbourhood which has seen better days, that bad weather affects it sooner than ano