The Water-Babies | Page 6

setting upon poor Sir John, year after year, and
trying to talk him into spending a hundred thousand pounds or so, in
building, to please them and not himself. But he always put them off,
like a canny North-countryman as he was. One wanted him to build a

Gothic house, but he said he was no Goth; and another to build an
Elizabethan, but he said he lived under good Queen Victoria, and not
good Queen Bess; and another was bold enough to tell him that his
house was ugly, but he said he lived inside it, and not outside; and
another, that there was no unity in it, but he said that that was just why
he liked the old place. For he liked to see how each Sir John, and Sir
Hugh, and Sir Ralph, and Sir Randal, had left his mark upon the place,
each after his own taste; and he had no more notion of disturbing his
ancestors' work than of disturbing their graves. For now the house
looked like a real live house, that had a history, and had grown and
grown as the world grew; and that it was only an upstart fellow who did
not know who his own grandfather was, who would change it for some
spick and span new Gothic or Elizabethan thing, which looked as if it
bad been all spawned in a night, as mushrooms are. From which you
may collect (if you have wit enough) that Sir John was a very
sound-headed, sound-hearted squire, and just the man to keep the
country side in order, and show good sport with his hounds.
But Tom and his master did not go in through the great iron gates, as if
they had been Dukes or Bishops, but round the back way, and a very
long way round it was; and into a little back-door, where the ash-boy
let them in, yawning horribly; and then in a passage the housekeeper
met them, in such a flowered chintz dressing-gown, that Tom mistook
her for My Lady herself, and she gave Grimes solemn orders about
"You will take care of this, and take care of that," as if he was going up
the chimneys, and not Tom. And Grimes listened, and said every now
and then, under his voice, "You'll mind that, you little beggar?" and
Tom did mind, all at least that he could. And then the housekeeper
turned them into a grand room, all covered up in sheets of brown paper,
and bade them begin, in a lofty and tremendous voice; and so after a
whimper or two, and a kick from his master, into the grate Tom went,
and up the chimney, while a housemaid stayed in the room to watch the
furniture; to whom Mr. Grimes paid many playful and chivalrous
compliments, but met with very slight encouragement in return.
How many chimneys Tom swept I cannot say; but he swept so many
that he got quite tired, and puzzled too, for they were not like the town

flues to which he was accustomed, but such as you would find-- if you
would only get up them and look, which perhaps you would not like to
do--in old country-houses, large and crooked chimneys, which had
been altered again and again, till they ran one into another,
anastomosing (as Professor Owen would say) considerably. So Tom
fairly lost his way in them; not that he cared much for that, though he
was in pitchy darkness, for he was as much at home in a chimney as a
mole is underground; but at last, coming down as he thought the right
chimney, he came down the wrong one, and found himself standing on
the hearthrug in a room the like of which he had never seen before.
Tom had never seen the like. He had never been in gentlefolks' rooms
but when the carpets were all up, and the curtains down, and the
furniture huddled together under a cloth, and the pictures covered with
aprons and dusters; and he had often enough wondered what the rooms
were like when they were all ready for the quality to sit in. And now he
saw, and he thought the sight very pretty.
The room was all dressed in white,--white window-curtains, white
bed-curtains, white furniture, and white walls, with just a few lines of
pink here and there. The carpet was all over gay little flowers; and the
walls were hung with pictures in gilt frames, which amused Tom very
much. There were pictures of ladies and gentlemen, and pictures of
horses and dogs. The horses he liked; but the dogs he did not care for
much, for there were no bull-dogs among them, not even a terrier. But
the two pictures which took his fancy