This man sweeps a crossing in a principal and central thoroughfare when
the weather is cold enough to let him walk; the colder the better,
he says, as it “numbs his stumps like.” He is unable to follow this
occupation in warm weather, as his legs feel “just like corns,” and
he cannot walk more than a mile a-day. Under these circumstances he
takes to begging, which he thinks he has a perfect right to do, as he
has been left destitute in what is to him almost a strange country,
and has been denied what he terms “his rights.” He generally sits
while begging, dressed in a sailor shirt and trousers, with a black
neckerchief round his neck, tied in the usual nautical knot. He places
before him the placard which is given beneath, and never moves a muscle
for the purpose of soliciting charity. He always appears scrupulously
clean.
I went to see him at his home early one morning--in fact, at
half-past eight, but he was not then up. I went again at nine, and
found him prepared for my visit in a little parlour, in a dirty and
rather disreputable alley running out of a court in a street near
Brunswick-square. The negro’s parlour was scantily furnished with
two chairs, a turn-up bedstead, and a sea-chest. A few odds and ends
of crockery stood on the sideboard, and a kettle was singing over
a cheerful bit of fire. The little man was seated on a chair, with
his stumps of legs sticking straight out. He showed some amount of
intelligence in answering my questions. We were quite alone, for he
sent his wife and child--the former a pleasant-looking “half-caste,”
and the latter the cheeriest little crowing, smiling “piccaninny” I
have ever seen--he sent them out into the alley, while I conversed with
himself.
His life is embittered by the idea that he has never yet had “his
rights”--that the owners of the ship in which his legs were burnt
off have not paid him his wages (of which, indeed, he says, he never
received any but the five pounds which he had in advance before
starting), and that he has been robbed of 42_l._ by a grocer in
Glasgow. How true these statements may be it is almost impossible to
say, but from what he says, some injustice seems to have been done him
by the canny Scotchman, who refuses him his “pay,” without which he is
determined “never to leave the country.”
“I was on that crossing,” he said, “almost the whole of last winter. It
was very cold, and I had nothing at all to do; so, as I passed there,
I asked the gentleman at the baccer-shop, as well as the gentleman at
the office, and I asked at the boot-shop, too, if they would let me
sweep there. The policeman wanted to turn me away, but I went to the
gentleman inside the office, and he told the policeman to leave me
alone. The policeman said first, ‘You must go away,’ but I said, ‘I
couldn’t do anything else, and he ought to think it a charity to let me
stop.’
“I don’t stop in London very long, though, at a time; I go to Glasgow,
in Scotland, where the owners of the ship in which my legs were burnt
off live. I served nine years in the merchant service and the navy. I
was born in Kingston, in Jamaica; it is an English place, sir, so I am
counted as not a foreigner. I’m different from them Lascars. I went to
sea when I was only nine years old. The owners is in London who had
that ship. I was cabin-boy; and after I had served my time I became
cook, or when I couldn’t get the place of cook I went before the mast.
I went as head cook in 1851, in the _Madeira_ barque; she used to be a
West Indy trader, and to trade out when I belonged to her. We got down
to 69 south of Cape Horn; and there we got almost froze and perished to
death. That is the book what I sell.”
The “Book” (as he calls it) consists of eight pages, printed on paper
the size of a sheet of note paper; it is entitled--
“BRIEF SKETCH OF THE LIFE OF