Mrs Lirripers Lodgings | 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 LODGINGS
CHAPTER I
--HOW MRS. LIRRIPER CARRIED ON THE BUSINESS

Whoever would begin to be worried with letting Lodgings that wasn't a
lone woman with a living to get is a thing inconceivable to me, my dear;
excuse the familiarity, but it comes natural to me in my own little room,
when wishing to open my mind to those that I can trust, and I should be
truly thankful if they were all mankind, but such is not so, for have but
a Furnished bill in the window and your watch on the mantelpiece, and
farewell to it if you turn your back for but a second, however
gentlemanly the manners; nor is being of your own sex any safeguard,
as I have reason, in the form of sugar-tongs to know, for that lady (and
a fine woman she was) got me to run for a glass of water, on the plea of
going to be confined, which certainly turned out true, but it was in the
Station-house.
Number Eighty-one Norfolk Street, Strand--situated midway between
the City and St. James's, and within five minutes' walk of the principal
places of public amusement--is my address. I have rented this house
many years, as the parish rate-books will testify; and I could wish my
landlord was as alive to the fact as I am myself; but no, bless you, not a
half a pound of paint to save his life, nor so much, my dear, as a tile
upon the roof, though on your bended knees.
My dear, you never have found Number Eighty-one Norfolk Street
Strand advertised in Bradshaw's Railway Guide, and with the blessing
of Heaven you never will or shall so find it. Some there are who do not
think it lowering themselves to make their names that cheap, and even
going the lengths of a portrait of the house not like it with a blot in
every window and a coach and four at the door, but what will suit
Wozenham's lower down on the other side of the way will not suit me,
Miss Wozenham having her opinions and me having mine, though
when it comes to systematic underbidding capable of being proved on
oath in a court of justice and taking the form of "If Mrs. Lirriper names
eighteen shillings a week, I name fifteen and six," it then comes to a
settlement between yourself and your conscience, supposing for the
sake of argument your name to be Wozenham, which I am well aware
it is not or my opinion of you would be greatly lowered, and as to airy
bedrooms and a night-porter in constant attendance the less said the

better, the bedrooms being stuffy and the porter stuff.
It is forty years ago since me and my poor Lirriper got married at St.
Clement's Danes, where I now have a sitting in a very pleasant pew
with genteel company and my own hassock, and being partial to
evening service not too crowded. My poor Lirriper was a handsome
figure of a man, with a beaming eye and a voice as mellow as a musical
instrument made of honey and steel, but he had ever been a free liver
being in the commercial travelling line and travelling what he called a
limekiln road--"a dry road, Emma my dear," my poor Lirriper says to
me, "where I have to lay the dust with one drink or another all day long
and half the night, and it wears me Emma"--and this led to his running
through a good deal and might have run through the