Crime -- England -- London; Police -- England -- London; Poor -- England -- London
For some months he lay in the workhouse infirmary, alone and unfriended,
and I thought the streets of London would know his peering eyes no more.
But there was more vitality in the old man than I expected. One cold
winter's day, when the snow was falling, I met a melancholy procession
of sandwich-men on Stamford Hill, among whom was Jonathan. The wind
buffeted him, and his hands and his face were blue with cold. "I could
not stand it any longer; I should have died if I had not come out," he
told me when I asked as to his welfare. He gave me his address, and the
quaint old man and I were again on visiting terms. Where he had bestowed
his strange collection during his sojourn in the workhouse I never
ascertained, but the bulk of it was in his new home. His things had been
taken care of, he said, but no more. "How are you going to live?" "They
allow me three shillings and sixpence from 'the house,' and I must pick
up the rest." So he proceeded to pick up, for his health improved and
his collection grew; but he did not pick up much money. The spring came,
and Jonathan grew young again. One fine morning I met him, looking quite
fresh and debonair. "Why, Jonathan," I said, "I really did not know you.
How well and fresh you look!" "Yes, bless the Lord! He gives me strength
to walk." "I wonder why He does that?" I foolishly said; but I expected
the answer I got. "To find things that nobody else would find, and to
prove that teetotallers are fools," he said. "But, Jonathan, I am a
teetotaller." "I can't help that, can I? Look here, you can tell me how
many gallons of water there is in a barrel of beer, but you can't tell
me how much paper you bought when you thought you were buying tea and
sugar." I humbly admitted my ignorance, and asked him what he was
finding. "All sorts of things. Come in and see them when you are down my
way." I went again to his "palace of varieties," and saw a cross of
about eighteen inches high, standing in a neat wooden base, which was
painted a bright vermilion, and a smaller cross made of cigarette-ends
standing beside it. Pointing to the latter, he said: "That's to lie on
my breast when I am in my coffin, and that" (the bigger one) "is to lie
on my coffin when I'm buried. I don't want any wreaths." Small chance of
wreaths at a parish funeral when this, our dear brother, is
unceremoniously committed to the earth, I thought; but he was fearful
about his tobacco. "You won't tell, will you? Don't give the show away,"
he said. I advised him not to offer the tobacco for sale this time. "Not
me; I'll die first," he promptly replied.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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