Part 7

During the spring months which elapse before the day of removal, you live in a state of dreamy bliss respecting your new house. Almost every fine morning you rise about seven for a walk, and, by a strange chance, you invariably take the house of promise in your way, and enjoy a survey of its external excellencies. When you observe, from the closed shutters, that its present occupants, so far from being agog about it like yourself, are snugly snoozing in their beds, you wonder at their indifference. If you were they, you would have been up hours ago, enjoying the air in the back-green, or playing the king of the Vandals in the front-plot. What a pity to see that splendid ruin of a rhododendron drooping in that fashion! What a shame to pay so little attention to the boxwood! At length, the 25th of May arrives. You transfer yourself to the now vacated tenement, pitying with all your heart the stupid people who have left it. For a time, a kind of honeymoon delirium pervades the household. You certainly do find some pleasure in contemplating from your drawing-room windows the cattle in the neighbouring grass-park, even though sensible all the time that they are only kept there _in petto_ by the exterminating butcher at the end of “the Row.” Your wife, too, reposes upon the joys of her back-green with a gratulation of spirit that seems as if it could never know an end. And while the servant girl rejoices in a chamber to herself, your boys have sport unceasing in pasting over the kitchen door with pictures and excellent new songs. But all this only holds good while summer lasts—summer, during which no house ever appears inconvenient or disadvantageous. By and bye comes the winter of your discontent. The views from the window are no longer fair; the back-green, which already in autumn had begun to lose its character as a play-ground, in consequence of the swarms of creeping things, which covered the walls in such a way as if they had a design to form a living entomological museum, and so fairly frightened the children into the house, is now a sink of mud and melting snow; the serving-wench finds that it was better to sleep in “that den above the kitchen door”—in so far as the said den was very “cosey”—than to lie in a chamber under the slates, exposed to the malevolence of the elements in all its shapes. You find, too, that in the short days it is not very agreeable to walk several times to and from town in the dark, through a district which, in the language of house-proprietors, “has the advantage of being out of the bounds of police.” The phrase, “within twenty minutes’ walk of the College,” appears to you as only calculated for the faculties of some itinerating prodigy, in as much as it never takes you less than twice the time. The worthy housewife herself, after long suffering in secret, and great reluctance to confess her counsel wrong, has to complain at last of “the distance from the market,” which obliges her to buy every thing from small dealers in the neighbourhood, who necessarily must make up for uncertain custom by “two prices.” No getting so much as a pennyworth of vegetables without sending for it nearly a mile; and then “that creature Jenny,” there is no sending her out, you know, even upon the shortest errand, but she stays an hour. When we want even so much as change for a shilling, there is no getting it nearer than Port Hopetoun, which is half a mile away. Then we are such a distance from the kirk. It is only in fine weather we are able to get that length, and at most only once in the day. I declare, if we stay here much longer, we shall become absolute heathens. Although, to be sure, we pay less taxes in this out-of-the-way place than we did before, have we not lost a washing-tub, from there being no police? And then, is there not a toll-bar betwixt us and the town, at which we must pay one shilling every time we have to go out or come home in a coach? And, above all things, we are cut off here from all our friends and acquaintances. We do not know a soul nearer hand than the Duncans, who live at the back of the Meadows. And there is no dropping in here, in an easy way, upon a forenoon call, but the people, when they reach us, are so much fatigued with the distance, that they must be asked to stay to dinner: and the case ends, perhaps, with the good man being obliged to walk three miles home with a young lady at twelve o’clock at night! Only think of that! No, no, this cold, outlandish, genteel place, will never do. Give me a good front door in the New Town, “with all the conveniences,” and I’ll leave such places as this to them that like them better.

When once a resolution is formed to leave a house, it is amazing how many holes are picked in its character, many of them literal. The wind gets in at a hundred places; we can see daylight through stone walls and double-deafened ceilings. Then, there is such a draught up the staircase, and into the best bed-room, that positively there is no enduring it. I think another six months of this house would fairly make an end of _me_. It’s not a house for tender folk. You might sometimes as well sit in the open street, as by the fireside. You burn your shins, and all the time your back is freezing. Upon my word, I think we should save all the difference between this and a front door in doctors’ bills!

A front door is then determined upon; and you think you have at length, by a little stretch of your purse, reached the very perfection of comfort. But alas! “_fronti nulla fides_,” which is as much as to say, there is no reliance to be placed on a front door. It is true, you escape all the evils of your former habitation, and that nothing can match your back kitchen as a convenience to the servants. But then the family living above you has twice your number of children; and these imps seem to do nothing whatever the whole day long, from six in the morning till seven at night, but run pat, pat, pat, along the floors overhead, till they almost drive you mad, _non vi sed sæpe cadendo_. Even the charms of a back-green, or a superior scullery, will not stand against this; and so you determine at last to go to an upper flat in the same neighbourhood, where you may have the pleasure of tormenting some person below with _your_ children, without the risk of being at the same time tormented yourself. The last selection is made upon moderate and prudent principles; but yet hope is also even here upon the wing. The house has no pretensions to style or external gentility, but yet “Edwin was no vulgar boy.” The stair is remarkably spacious and well lighted, and has, further, the advantage of a door at the bottom, which can be opened by any inhabitant, by means of a pulley, without the necessity of descending to the bottom. In fact, it is what I would call a genteel stair. “The Stevensons” live in the first _flat_. The kitchen door has a nice hole at the lower corner for the cat; and what a delightful place there is by the side of the fire for the lamp, or where we could keep our salt dry in a _pig_! The request of the Regent Earl of Mar, as inscribed on the front of his house at Stirling,

“I pray all lukaris on this ludging With gentil ee to gif their judging,”

comes powerfully into force in all cases where the tenant is just entering upon his house. As in the other case every fault is exaggerated, and made the subject of congratulatory disgust, so in this, every fault is extenuated. “The ceilings are a little contracted, I see, by the roof.” “Oh! a wee thought coomceyled—a very small matter; these rooms are only intended for the children. We have some capital _public_ rooms at the back, looking into the Queen Street gardens, and have a little peep of the sea in the distance.” “Upper flats,” observes your Malagrowther friend, “are very apt to smoke.” “Oh! not at all, I assure you. But I have been assured that Dr Bonnyman cured this house entirely some years ago, and since then there has never been a single puff of smoke.” “Your nursery is in the garret; don’t you think the children will feel it rather cold?” “Oh, the most comfortable nursery in the world; and see, _only see_, what a nice door there is at the top of the garret stair to prevent the bairns from tumbling down!” “I am sorry, however, to see a green-wife established so close beneath the door, at the bottom of your _common_ stair.” “Oh, Sir, but consider the convenience of the greens.” In fact, there is no peculiarity about the house, however trifling, but, in the eyes of a new tenant, it will seem a beauty, as in those of a departing one it will constitute a disgrace. And this is just the philosophy of the question, and the real cause why there is so much useless tossing and tumbling of old furniture on each 25th of May.

VICTIMS.

The industrious classes of the middle rank are, on the one hand, _attracted onwards_ to wealth and respectability, by contemplating men, formerly of their own order, who having, as the saying is, feathered their nests, now lie at ease, a kind of _conscripti patres_; while they are, on the other hand, _repelled_ from the regions of poverty and disgrace by the sight of a great many wretched persons, who having, under the influence of some unhappy star, permitted their good resolutions of industry and honour to give way, are sunk from their former estate, and now live—if living it can be called—in a state of misery and ignominy almost too painful to be thought of. There may be a use in this—as there is a use for beacons and buoys at sea. But oh, the desolation of such a fate! As different as the condition of a vessel which ever bends its course freely and gallantly over the seas, on some joyous expedition of profit or adventure, compared with one which has been deprived of all the means of locomotion, and chained down upon some reef of rocks, merely to tell its happier companions that it is to be avoided; so different is the condition of a man still engaged in the hopeful pursuits of life, and one who has lost all its prospects.

The progress of men who live by their daily industry, through this world, may be likened, in some respects, to the march of an army through an enemy’s country. He who, from fatigue, from disease, from inebriety, from severe wounds, or whatever cause, falls out of the line of march, and lays him down by the wayside, is sure, as a matter of course, to be destroyed by the peasantry; once let the column he belongs to pass on a little way ahead, and death is his sure portion. It is a dreadful thing to fall behind the onward march of the world.

VICTIMS—the word placed at the head of this article—is a designation for those woe-begone mortals who have had the misfortune to drop out of the ranks of society. Every body must know more or less of _victims_, for every body must have had to pay a smaller or greater number of half-crowns in his time to keep them from starvation. It happens, however, that the present writer has had _a great deal to do with victims_; and he therefore conceives himself qualified to afford his neighbours a little information upon the subject. It is a subject not without its moral.

A _victim_ may become so from many causes. Some men are wrong placed in the world by their friends, and ruin themselves. Some are ill married, and lose heart. Others have tastes unsuited to the dull course of a man of business, as for music, social pleasures, the company of men _out of their own order_, and so forth. Other men have natural imperfections of character, and sink down, from pure inability to compete with rivals of more athletic constitution. But the grand cause of declension in life is inability to accommodate circumstances and conduct.

Suppose a man to have broken credit with the world, and made that treaty of perpetual hostility with it, which, _quasi lucus a non lucendo_, is called a _cessio bonorum_—what is he to do next? One thing is dead clear: he no more appears on Prince’s Street or the bridges. They are to him as a native and once familiar land, from which he is exiled for ever. His migrations from one side of the town to the other are now accomplished by by-channels, which, however well known to our ancestors, are in the present day dreamt of by nobody, except, perhaps, the author of the Traditions of Edinburgh. I once came full upon a _victim_ in Croftangry, a wretched alley near the Palace of Holyrood House; he looked the very Genius of the place! But the ways of _victims_ are in general very occult. Sometimes I have altogether lost sight of one for several years, and given him up for dead. But at length he would re-appear amidst the crowd at a midnight fire, as salmon come from the deepest pools towards the lighted sheaf of the fisherman, or as some old revolutionary names that had disappeared from French history for a quarter of a century, came again above board on the occasion of the late revolution at Paris. At one particular conflagration, which happened some years ago, I observed several _victims_, who had long vanished from the open daylight streets, come out to glare with their bleared eyes upon the awful scene—perhaps unroosted from their dens by the progress of the “devouring element.” But—what is a _victim_ like?

The progress of a _victim’s_ gradual deterioration depends very much upon the question, whether he has, according to the old joke, failed with a waistcoat or a full suit. Suppose the latter contingency: he keeps up a decent appearance for some months after the fatal event, perhaps even making several attempts to keep up a few of his old acquaintance. It won’t do, however; the clothes get worn—threadbare—slit—torn—patched—darned; let ink, thread, and judicious arrangement of person, do their best. The hat, the shoes, and the gloves, fail first; he then begins to wear a suspicious deal of whitey-brown linen in the way of cravat. Collars fail. Frills retire. The vest is buttoned to the uppermost button, or even, perhaps, with a supplementary pin (a pin is the most squalid object in nature or art) at top. Still at this period he tries to carry a jaunty, genteel air; he has not yet all forgot himself to rags. But, see, the buttons begin to show something like new moons at one side; these moons become _full_; they _change_; and then the button is only a little wisp of thread and rags, deprived of all power of retention over the button-hole. His watch has long been gone to supply the current wants of the day. The vest by and bye retires from business, and the coat is buttoned up to the chin. About this period, he perhaps appears in a pair of nankeen trousers, which, notwithstanding the coldness of the weather, he tries to sport in an easy, genteel fashion, as if it were his taste. If you meet him at this time, and inquire how he is getting on in the world, he speaks very confidently of some excellent situation he has a prospect of, which will make him better than ever; it is perhaps to superintend a large new blacking manufactory which is to be set up at Portobello, and for which two acres of stone bottles, ten feet deep, have already been collected from all the lumber-cellars in the country; quite a nice easy business; nothing to do but collect the orders and see them executed; good salary, free house, coal, candle, and _blacking_; save a pound a-year on the article of blacking alone. Or it is some other _concern_ equally absurd, but which the disordered mind of the poor unfortunate is evidently rioting over with as much enjoyment as if it were to make him once more what he had been in his better days. At length—but not perhaps till two or three years have elapsed—he becomes that lamentable picture of wretchedness which is his ultimate destiny; a mere pile of clothes without pile—a deplorable—a _victim_.

As a picture of an individual _victim_, take the following:—My earliest recollections of Mr Kier refer to his keeping a seed-shop in the New Town of Edinburgh. He was a remarkably smart active man, and could tie up little parcels of seeds with an almost magical degree of dispatch. When engaged in that duty, your eye lost sight of his fingers altogether, as you cease to individualise the spokes of a wheel when it is turned with great rapidity. He was the inventor of a curious tall engine, with a peculiar pair of scissors at top, for cutting fruit off trees. This he sent through Prince’s Street every day with one of his boys, who was instructed every now and then to draw the string, so as to make the scissors close as sharply as possible. The boy would watch his men—broad-skirted men with top-boots—and, gliding in before them, would make the thing play _clip_. “Boy, boy,” the country gentleman would cry, “what’s that?” The boy would explain; the gentleman would be delighted with the idea of cutting down any particular apple he chose out of a thickly laden and unapproachable tree; and, after that, nothing more was required than to give him the card of the shop. Mr Kier, however, was not a man of correct or temperate conduct. He used to indulge even in forenoon potations. Opposite to his shop there was a tavern, to which he was in the habit of sending a boy every day for a tumbler of spirits and water, which the wretch was carefully enjoined to carry under his apron. One day the boy forgot the precaution, and carried the infamous crystal quite exposed in his hand across the open and crowded street. Mr Kier was surveying his progress both in going and returning; and when he observed him coming towards the shop, with so damnatory a proof of his malpractices holden forth to the gaze of the world, he leaped and danced within his shop window like a supplejack in a glass case. The poor boy came in quite innocently, little woting of the crime he had committed, or the reception he was to meet with, when, just as he had deposited the glass upon the counter, a blow from the hand of his master stretched him insensibly in a remote corner of the shop, among a parcel of seed-bags. As no qualities will succeed in business unless perfectly good conduct be among the number, and, above all things, an absence from tippling, Kier soon became a _victim_. After he first took to the _bent_, to use Rob Roy’s phrase, I lost sight of him for two or three years. At length I one day met him on a road a little way out of town. He wore a coat buttoned to the chin, and which, being also very long in the breast, according to a fashion which obtained about the year 1813, seemed to enclose his whole trunk from neck to groin. With the usual cataract of cravat, he wore a hat the most woe-begone, the most dejected, the most melancholy I had ever seen. His face was inflamed and agitated, and as he walked, he swung out his arms with a strange emphatic expression, as if he were saying, “I am an ill-used man, but I’ll tell it to the world.” Misery had evidently given him a slight craze, as it almost always does when it overtakes a man accustomed in early life to better things. Some time afterwards I saw him a little revivified through the influence of a _new second-hand coat_, and he seemed, from a small leathern parcel which he bore under his arm, to be engaged in some small agency. But this was a mere flash before utter expiration. He relapsed to the Cowgate—to rags—to wretchedness—to madness—immediately after. When I next saw him, it was in that street, the time midnight. He lay in the bottom of a stair, more like a heap of mud than a man. A maniac curse, uttered as I stumbled over him, was the means of my recognising it to be Kier.

The system of life pursued by _victims_ in general, is worthy of being inquired into. _Victims_ hang much about taverns in the outskirts of the town. Perhaps a decent man from Pennycuik, with the honest rustic name of Walter Brown, or James Gowans, migrates to the Candlemaker Row, or the Grassmarket, and sets up a small public house. You may know the man by his corduroy spatterdashes, and the latchets of his shoes drawn through them by two pye-holes. He is an honest man, believing every body to be as honest as himself. Perhaps he has some antiquated and prescribed right to the stance of a hay-stack at Pennycuik, and is not without his wishes to try his fortune in the Parliament House. Well, the _victims_ soon scent out his house by the glare of his new sign—the _novitas regni_—and upon him they fall tooth and nail. Partly through simplicity, partly by having his feelings excited regarding the stance of the hay-stack, he gives these gentlemen some credit. For a while you may observe a flocking of _victims_ toward his doorway, like the gathering of clean and unclean things to Noah’s ark. But it is not altogether a case of deception. _Victims_, somehow or other, occasionally _have_ money. True, it is seldom in greater sums than sixpence. But then, consider the importance of sixpence to a flock of _victims_. Such a sum, judiciously managed, may get the whole set meat and drink for a day. At length, when Walter begins to find his barrels run dry, with little return of money wherewithal to replenish them, and when the joint influence of occasional apparitions of sixpence, and the stance of the hay-stack at Pennycuik, has no longer any effect upon him, why, what is to be done but fly to some other individual, equally able and willing to bleed?

One thing is always very remarkable in _victims_, namely, their extraordinary frankness and politeness. A _victim_ might have been an absolute bear in his better days; but hunger, it is said, will tame a lion, and it seems to have the same effect in subduing the asperities of a _victim_. Meet a _victim_ where you will—that is, before he has become altogether deplorable—and you are amazed at the bland, confidential air which he has assumed; so different, perhaps, from what he sported in better days. His manner, in fact, is most insinuating—into your pocket; and if you do not get alarmed at the symptoms, and break off in time, you are brought down for half a crown as sure as you live. _Victims_ keep up a kind of constant _civil_ war with shops. They mark those which have been recently opened, and where they see only young men behind the counter. They try to establish a kind of credit of face, by now and then dropping in and asking, in a genteel manner, for a sight of a Directory, or for a bit of twine, or for “the _least_ slip of paper,” occasionally even spending a halfpenny or a penny in a candid, honourable way, with all the air of a person wishing to befriend the shop. In the course of these “transactions,” they endeavour to excite a little conversation, beginning with the weather, gradually expanding to a remark upon the state of business; and, perhaps, ending with a sympathising inquiry as to the prospects which the worthy shopkeeper himself may have of succeeding in his present situation. At length, having laid down what painters call a _priming_, they come in some day, in a hurried fiddle-faddle kind of way, and hastily and confidentially ask across the counter, “Mr——[victims are always particular in saying _Master_], have you got such a thing as fourpence in ha’pence? I just want to pay a porter, and happen to have no change.” The specification of “fourpence in ha’pence,” though in reality nonsense, carries the day; it gives a plausibility and credit-worthiness to the demand that could not otherwise be obtained. The unfortunate shopkeeper, carried away by the contagious bustle of the _victim_, plunges his hand, quick as thought, into the till, and before he knows where he is, he is minus a groat, and the _victim_ has vanished from before him—and the whole transaction, reflected upon three minutes afterwards, seems as if it had been a dream.