Boys -- Fiction; London (England) -- Fiction; Slums -- Fiction
Dicky, with a cast-off jacket from the vicar's store, took to hanging
about Liverpool Street Station in quest of bags to carry. Sometimes he
got bags, and coppers for carrying them: sometimes he got kicks from
porters. An hour or two of disappointment in this pursuit would send him
off on the prowl to 'find' new stock for Mr Weech. He went farther
afield now: to the market-places in Mile End and Stepney, and to the
riverside, where there were many chances--guarded jealously, however, by
the pirate boys of the neighbourhood, who would tolerate no interlopers
at the wharves. In the very early morning, too, he practised the
sand-bag fake, in the Jago. For there were those among the Jagos who
kept (two even bred) linnets and such birds, and prepared them for
julking, or singing matches at the Bag of Nails. It was the habit of the
bird-fanciers to hang their little wooden cages on nails out of window,
and there they hung through the night: for it had been noted, as a
surprising peculiarity in linnets, that a bird would droop and go off
song after a dozen or so of nights in a Jago room, in company with
eight, ten or a dozen human sleepers, notwithstanding the thoughtful
shutting of windows. So that any early riser provided with a little bag
packed with a handful or so of sand, could become an opulent bird-owner
in half-an-hour. Let but the sand-bag be pitched with proper skill at
the bottom of a cage, and that cage would leave the nail, and come
tumbling and fluttering down into the ready hands of the early riser.
The sand-bag brought down the cage and fell quietly on the flags, which
was why it was preferred before a stone. The sand-bag faker was moved by
no particular love of linnets. His spoil was got rid of as soon as the
bird-shops opened in Club Row. And his craft was one of danger.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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