Mrs Lirripers Legacy | Page 3

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This etext was prepared from the 1894 Chapman and Hall "Christmas
Stories" edition by David Price, email [email protected]

Mrs. Lirriper's Legacy
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