--I don't know any place that brings all classes into
contiguity on equal ground so completely as the waiting-room at Rock
Ferry on these frosty days. The room is not more than eight feet,
square, with walls of stone, and wooden benches ranged round them, and an
open stove in one corner, generally well furnished with coal. It is
almost always crowded, and I rather suspect that many persons who have no
fireside elsewhere creep in here and spend the most comfortable part of
their day.
This morning, when I looked into the room, there were one or two
gentlemen and other respectable persons; but in the best place, close to
the fire, and crouching almost into it, was an elderly beggar, with the
raggedest of overcoats, two great rents in the shoulders of it disclosing
the dingy lining, all bepatched with various stuff covered with dirt, and
on his shoes and trousers the mud of an interminable pilgrimage. Owing
to the posture in which he sat, I could not see his face, but only the
battered crown and rim of the very shabbiest hat that ever was worn.
Regardless of the presence of women (which, indeed, Englishmen seldom do
regard when they wish to smoke), he was smoking a pipe of vile tobacco;
but, after all, this was fortunate, because the man himself was not
personally fragrant. He was terribly squalid,--terribly; and when I had
a glimpse of his face, it well befitted the rest of his development,--
grizzled, wrinkled, weather-beaten, yet sallow, and down-looking, with a
watchful kind of eye turning upon everybody and everything, meeting the
glances of other people rather boldly, yet soon shrinking away; a long
thin nose, a gray beard of a week's growth; hair not much mixed with
gray, but rusty and lifeless;--a miserable object; but it was curious to
see how he was not ashamed of himself, but seemed to feel that he was one
of the estates of the kingdom, and had as much right to live as other
men.
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