Casuals of the sea Author:William McFee Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: BOOK THREE THE SEA " To all whose souls are weary, To all whose souls are tad With piteous days or dreary, To all whose hearts are glad The great sea'... more »s soul has spoken, The great sea brings release, And even hearts half-broken Win something of its peace." MRS. GOODERICH sat near the carefully curtained window of her house, or rather her one-third of a house in Jubilee Street, E. The third consisted of the use of the front passage, the ground floor fronts, and a curious middle chamber, lighted by transoms, which served as a scullery and coal-shed. The ground floor back was ruled by an Irish woman from Cavan, who also washed for a very respectable Bohemian family who disseminated themselves over the rest of the house. The Bohemian family had evidently seen better days, probably before Bohemia got its bad name; they were astonishingly quick to see the respectability of Mrs. Gooderich, who had curtains, and the impossibility of the Irish woman from Cavan, who had none. They at once invested in curtains, and there they were at the upper windows, the colour being that sombre grey which is the London equivalent for white, and providing for the Bohemian females an effective screen behind which they could look down at life in Jubilee Street or peer curiously across at the occasional excitement of a scuffle, a fight, or an arrest in Assembly Passage. They tell me that all this is changed now, that Jubilee Street is so congested with respectable people that Irishwomen from Cavan and anarchists from Oran are crying out, " No room to live! "; that Assembly Passage is a Valley of Peace, and policemen no longer find it expedient to patrol it in couples. It sounds Utopian and unreal; if it is true, who shall despair of the Ultimate Reclamation of the World? It was a bright...« less