C. district stands a squalid public-house, the type of many
hundreds and thousands of similar dens in the metropolis. The "Myrtle
Grove Tavern," pastoral as the name sounds, was not precisely the abode of
peace and goodwill. From four A.M., when the first of her _habitues_
began to muster round the yet unopened doors, till half-past twelve P.M.,
when the last of them was expelled by the sturdy "chucker-out," the
atmosphere was dense with the foul breath and still fouler language of
drunken and besotted men and women. Every phase of the lower order of
British drinker and drunkard was represented here. The coarse oaths of the
men, mingled with the shriller voices of their female companions, and the
eternal "'e saids" and "she saids" of the latter's complaints and disputes
were interrupted by the plaintive wailings of the puny, gin-nourished
infants at their breasts. Here, too, sat the taciturn man, clay pipe in
mouth, on his accustomed bench day after day, year in year out, gazing
with stony and blear-eyed indifference on all that went on around him;
deaf, dumb, and unseeing; only spitting deliberately at intervals, and
with apparently no other vocation in life than the consumption of
fermented liquor.
The side-door for "jugs and bottles" gave on to a dirty and odoriferous
mews, down which my destination lay. The unbridled enthusiasm of eighteen
years can do much to harden or deaden the nervous system, but certainly it
required all my fortitude to withstand the sickening combination of beer
and damp horsy hay which greeted my nostrils.
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