CHAPTER I -- MRS. LIRRIPER RELATES HOW SHE WENT ON, AND WENT
OVER
Ah! It's pleasant to drop into my own easy-chair my dear though a little palpitating what
with trotting up-stairs and what with trotting down, and why kitchen stairs should all be
corner stairs is for the builders to justify though I do not think they fully understand their
trade and never did, else why the sameness and why not more conveniences and fewer
draughts and likewise making a practice of laying the plaster on too thick I am well
convinced which holds the damp, and as to chimney-pots putting them on by guess-work
like hats at a party and no more knowing what their effect will be upon the smoke bless
you than I do if so much, except that it will mostly be either to send it down your throat
in a straight form or give it a twist before it goes there. And what I says speaking as I find
of those new metal chimneys all manner of shapes (there's a row of 'em at Miss
Wozenham's lodging-house lower down on the other side of the way) is that they only
work your smoke into artificial patterns for you before you swallow it and that I'd quite
as soon swallow mine plain, the flavour being the same, not to mention the conceit of
putting up signs on the top of your house to show the forms in which you take your
smoke into your inside.
Being here before your eyes my dear in my own easy-chair in my own quiet room in my
own Lodging-House Number Eighty-one Norfolk Street Strand London situated midway
between the City and St. James's--if anything is where it used to be with these hotels
calling themselves Limited but called unlimited by Major Jackman rising up everywhere
and rising up into flagstaffs where they can't go any higher, but my mind of those
monsters is give me a landlord's or landlady's wholesome face when I come off a journey
and not a brass plate with an electrified number clicking out of it which it's not in nature
can be glad to see me and to which I don't want to be hoisted like molasses at the Docks
and left there telegraphing for help with the most ingenious instruments but quite in vain-
-being here my dear I have no call to mention that I am still in the Lodgings as a business
hoping to die in the same and if agreeable to the clergy partly read over at Saint
Clement's Danes and concluded in Hatfield churchyard when lying once again by my
poor Lirriper ashes to ashes and dust to dust.
Neither should I tell you any news my dear in telling you that the Major is still a fixture
in the Parlours quite as much so as the roof of the house, and that Jemmy is of boys the
best and brightest and has ever had kept from him the cruel story of his poor pretty young
mother Mrs. Edson being deserted in the second floor and dying in my arms, fully
believing that I am his born Gran and him an orphan, though what with engineering since
he took a taste for it and him and the Major making Locomotives out of parasols broken
iron pots and cotton-reels and them absolutely a getting off the line and falling over the
table and injuring the passengers almost equal to the originals it really is quite wonderful.
And when I says to the Major, "Major can't you by ANY means give us a communication
