The Adventures of Harry Revel | Page 9

doubt you did, my dear."
"That's what you are. You're a lowering man. And there by your own
account you met a lady, with your neck streaked like a ham-rasher, and
me not by--thank goodness!--to see what her feelings were; and now
'tis magistrates. But nothing warns you. I suppose you thought that as
'twas only fondlings without any father or mother it didn't matter how
you dressed!"
Mrs. Trapp, though she might seem to talk at random, had a wifely
knack of dropping a shaft home. Her husband protested.
"Come, come, Maria--you know I'm not that sort of man!"
"How do I know what sort of man you are, under all that dirt? For my
part, if I'd been a magistrate, you shouldn't have walked off with the
boy till you'd washed yourself, not if you'd gone down on your hands
and knees for it; and him with his face shining all over like a little
Moses on the Mount, which does the lady credit if she's the one you
saw; though how they can dress children up like pickle-herrings it beats
me. Your bed's at the top of the house, child, and there you'll find a suit
o' clothes that I've washed and aired after the last boy. I only hope you
won't catch any of his nasty tricks in 'em. Straight up the stairs and the
little door to the left at the top."
"Unless"--Mr. Trapp picked up courage for one more

pleasantry--"you'd like to make a start at once and go up by way of the
chimbley."
He was rash. As a pugilist might eye a recovering opponent supposed
to be stunned, so Mrs. Trapp eyed Mr. Trapp.
"I thought I told you plain enough," she said, "that you're a lowering
man. What's worse, you're an unconverted one. Oh, you nasty, fat,
plain-featured fellow! Go indoors and wash yourself, this instant!"
I spent close upon four years with this couple: and good parents they
were to me, as well as devoted to each other. Mrs. Trapp may have
been "cracked," as she certainly suffered from a determination of words
to the mouth: but, as a child will, I took her and the rest of the world as
I found them. She began to mother me at once; and on the very next
morning took my clothes in hand, snipped the ridiculous tails off the
jacket, and sent it, with the breeches, to the dyer's. The yellow
waistcoat she cut into pin-cushions, two for upstairs and two for the
parlour.
Having no children to save for, Mr. Trapp could afford to feed and
clothe an apprentice and take life easily to boot. Mrs. Trapp would
never allow him to climb a ladder; had even chained him to terra firma
by a vow--since, as she explained to me once, "he's an unconverted
man. There's no harm in 'en; but I couldn't bear to have him cut off in
his sins. Besides, with such a figure, he'd scatter."
I recollect it as a foretaste of his kindness that on the first early morning,
as he led me forth to my first experiment, we paused between the blank
walls of the alley that I might practise the sweep's call in comparative
privacy. The sound of my own voice, reverberated there, covered me
with shame, though it could scarcely have been louder than the
cheeping of the birds on the Citadel ramparts above. "Hark to that
fellow, now!" said my master, as the notes of a bugle sang out clear and
brave in the dawn. "He's no bigger than you, I warrant, and has no more
call to be proud of his business." In time I grew bold enough and used
to begin my "Sweep, Swee--eep!" at the mouth of the alley to warn Mrs.
Trapp of our return.

My first chimney daunted me, though it was a wide one, belonging to a
cottage, well fitted with climbing brackets, and so straight that from the
flat hearth-stone you could see a patch of blue sky with the gulls sailing
across it. Mr. Trapp instructed me well and I listened, setting my small
jaws to choke down the terror: but, once started, with his voice guiding
me from below and growing hollower as I ascended, I found that all
came easily enough. "Bravo!" he shouted up from the far side of the
street, whither he had run out to see me wave my brush from the
summit. In a day or two he began to boast of me, and I had to do my
young best to live up to a reputation; for the fame of my feat on
Emmanuel Church spire had spread all over the Barbican. Being
reckoned a bold fellow, I had to justify myself in fighting with the
urchins of