Stranica 143 [143]
OCR
101 ways and alleys, he at length emerged on Snow Hill. Here he walked even faster than before; nor did he linger until he had again turned into a court, when, as if conscious that he was now in his proper element, he fell into his usual shuf. pace, and seemed to breathe more eely. Near to the spot on which Snow Hill and Holborn Hill meet, there opens, upon the right hand as you come out of the city, a narrow and dismal alley leading to Saffron Hill. In its filthy shops are exposed for sale huge bunches of secondhand silk handkerchiefs of all sizes and patterns,—for here reside the traders who purchase them from pickpockets. Hundreds of these handkerchiefs hang danghing from pegs outside the windows, or unting from the door-posts; and the shelves within are piled with them. Confined as the limits of Field Lane are, it has its barber, its coffee-shop, its beershop, and its fried-fish warehouse. It is a commercial colony of itself, the emporium of petty larceny, visited at early morning and setting-in of dusk by silent merchants, who traffic in dark back-parlours, and go as strangely as they came. Here the clothesman, the shoe-vamper, and the ragmerchant display their goods as signboards to the petty thief; and stores of old iron and bones, and heaps of mildewy sa. acy of woollen stuff and linen, rust and rot in the grimy cellars. It was into this place that the Jew turned. He was well known to the sallow denizens of the lane, for such of them as were on the look-out to buy or sell, nodded familiarly as he passed along. He replied to their salutations in the same way, but bestowed no closer recognition until he reached the further end of the alley, when he stopped to address a salesman of small stature, who had squeezed as much of his person into a child’s chair as the chair would hold, and was smoking a pipe at his warehouse-door. “ Why, the sight of you, Mister Fagin, would cure the hoptalmy !” said this respectable trader, in acknowledgment of the Jew’s inquiry after his health. c The neighbourhood was a little too hot, Lively!” said Fagin, elevating his eyebrows, and crossing his hands upon his oulders. “Well! I’ve heerd that complaint of it once or twice before,” replied the trader, “ but it soon cools down again; don’t you find it so?” Te nodded in the affirmative, and, pointing in the direction of Saffron Hill, inquired whether any one was up yonder to-night. “ At the Cripples?” inquired the man, The Jew nodded. s Let me see!” pursued the merchant, reflecting. “Yes; there’s some half ‘em gone in, that I knows on. I don’t think your friend ’s there.” c Sikes is not, I suppose?" inquired the Jew with a disappointed countenance. 6 Non istwentus, as the lawyers say,” replied the little man, shaking his head, and looking amazing sly. ‘Have you got anything in my line to-night ?” | _ “ Nothing to-night,” said the Jew, turning away. “ Are you going up to the Cripples, Fain?” cried the little man, calling after Fim. “Stop! I don’t mind if I have a drain there with you!” But as the Jew, looking back, waved his hand to intimate that he preferred being alone; and, moreover, as the little man could not very easily disengage himself from the chair, the sign of the Cripples was, for a time, bereft of the advantage of Mr. Lively’s presence. By the time he had got upon his legs the Jew had disappeared; so Mr. Lively, after ineffectually standing on tip-toe, in the hope of catching sight of him, again forced himself into the little chair, and, exchanging a shake of the head with a lady in the opposite shop, in which doubt and mistrust were plainly mingled, resumed his pipe with grave demeanour. he Three Cripples, or rather the Cripples, which was the sign by which the establishment was familianly known to its patrons, was the same public-house in which Mr. Sikes and his dog have already figured. Merely making a sign to a man in the bar, Fagin walked straight up stairs, and opening the door of a room, and softly insinuating himself into the chamber, looked anxiously about, shadin his eyes with his hand, as if in search o some particular person. The room was illuminated by two. gaslights, the glare of which was prevented, by the barred shutters and closely-drawn curtains of faded red, from being visible outside. The ceiling was blackened, to prevent its colour being injured by the flaring of the lamps; and the place was so full of dense tobacco-smoke, that at first it was scarcely possible to discern anything further. By degrees, however, as some of it cleared away through the open door, an assemblage of heads, as
