WRECKED IN PORT.
A SERIAL STORY BY THE AUTHOR OF "BLACK SHEEP."

CHAPTER VI. BREAD SEEKING.

THERE are few streets in London better
known to that large army of martyrs, the
genteelly-poor, than those which run northward
from the Strand, and are lost in the
two vast tracts of brick known under the
names of Covent-garden and Drury-lane.
Lodging-house keepers do not affect these
streets, preferring the narrow no-thoroughfares
on the other side of the Strand, abutting
on the river; streets eternally ringing
with the hoarse voice of the costermonger,
who descends on one side and ascends on
the other; eternally echoing to the grinding
of the organ-man, who gets through his
entire répertoire twice over during his progress
to the railing overlooking the mud-
bank, and his return to the pickle-shop at
the top; eternally haunted by the beer-boy
and the newspaper-boy, by postmen infuriated
with wrongly addressed letters,
and by luggage-laden cabs. In the
streets bearing northward no costermonger
screams and no organ is found; the denizens
are business-people, and would very soon put
a stop to any such attempt. Business, and
nothing but business, in that drab-coloured
house with the high wire blinds in the
window, over which you can just catch a
glimpse of the top of a hanging white robe.
Cope and Son are the owners of the drab-
coloured house, and Cope and Son are the
largest retailers of clerical millinery in
London. All day long members of "the
cloth," sleek, pale, emaciated, high church
curates; stout, fresh-coloured, huge-whiskered,
broad church rectors; fat, pasty-faced,
straight-haired evangelical ministers, are
pouring into Cope and Son's for clothes,
for hoods, for surplices, for stoles, for every
variety of ecclesiastical garment. Cope and
Son supply all, in every variety, for every sect;
the M.B. waistcoat and stiff-collared coat
reaching to his heels in which the Honourable
and Reverend Cyril Genuflex looks so
imposing, as he, before the assembled
vestry, defies the scrutiny of his evangelical
churchwarden; the pepper-and-salt
cutaway in which the Reverend Pytchley
Quorn follows the hounds; the black stuff
gown in which the Reverend Locock Congreve
perspires and groans as he deals out
denunciations of those sitting under him;
and the purple bedgown, turned up with
yellow satin, and worked all over with
crosses and vagaries, in which poor Tom
Phoole, such a kind-hearted and such a
soft-headed vessel, goes through his ritualistic
tricks—all these come from the establishment
of Cope and Son's, in Rutland-
street, Strand. The next house on the
right is handy for the high church clergymen,
though the evangelicals shut their
eyes and turn away their heads as they pass
by it. Here Herr Tubelkahn, from Elberfeld,
the cunning worker in metals, the artificer
of brass and steel and iron, and sometimes
of gold and silver, the great ecclesiastical
upholsterer, has set up his lares and penates,
and here he deals in the loveliest of mediævalisms
and the choicest of renaissance
wares. The sleek long-coated gentry who
come to make purchases can scarcely thread
their way through the heterogeneous contents
of Herr Tubelkahn's shop. All massed
together without order; black oaken chairs,
bought up by Tubelkahn's agents from occupants
of tumbledown old cottages in
midland districts; crosiers and crucifixes,
ornate and plain, from Elberfeld; sceptres
and wands from Solingen, lecterns in the