Everything immediately imaginable for the outside or inside of man
seemed on sale: clothing of all kinds, boots and shoes, hats and caps,
glassware, iron-ware; fruits and vegetables, heaps of unripe English
hazelnuts, and heaps of Spanish grapes which had failed to ripen on the
way; fish, salt and fresh, and equally smelling to heaven; but, above
all, flesh meats of every beast of the field and every bird of the
barnyard, with great girls hewing and hacking at the carnage, and
strewing the ground under their stands with hoofs and hides and claws
and feathers and other less namable refuse. There was a notable absence
among the hucksters of that coster class which I used to see in London
twenty odd years before, or at least an absence of the swarming buttons
on jackets and trousers which used to distinguish the coster. But among
the customers, whose number all but forbade our passage through the
street, with the noise of their feet and voices, there were, far beyond
counting, those short, stubbed girls and women as typically cockney
still as the costers ever were. They were of a plinth-like bigness
up and down, and their kind, plain, common faces were all topped with
narrow-brimmed sailor-hats, mostly black. In their jargoning hardly
an aspirate was in its right place, but they looked as if their hearts
were, and if no word came from their lips with its true quality, but
with that curious soft London slur or twist, they doubtless spoke a
sound business dialect.
When we traversed the dense body of the market and entered Roscoe Street
from Whitecross, we were surprisingly soon out of its hubbub in a quiet
befitting the silent sectaries, who once made so great a spiritual
clamor in the world. We were going to look at the grave of George Fox,
because of his relation to our colonial history in Pennsylvania
and Rhode Island, and we thought it well to look into the Friends'
Meeting-house on the way, for a more fitting frame of mind than we might
have brought with us from Whitecross Street. A mute sexton welcomed us
at the door, and held back for us the curtain of the homely quadrangular
interior, where we found twoscore or more of such simple folk as Fox
might have preached to in just such a place. The only difference was
that they now wore artless versions of the world's present fashions
in dress, and not the drabs of out-dated cut which we associate with
Quakerism. But this was right, for that dress is only the antiquated
simplicity of the time when Quakerism began; and the people we now saw
were more fitly dressed than if they had worn it. We sat with them a
quarter of an hour in the stillness which no one broke, the elders on
the platform, with their brows bowed on their hands, apparently more
deeply lost in it than the rest. Then we had freedom (to use their
gentle Quaker parlance) to depart, and I hope we did so without offence.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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