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London town; sketches of London life and character, by Marcus Fall
London town sketches of London life and character by Marcus Fall Author:Richard Dowling 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: THE HAUNTED MAN. The Haunted Man is tall, long, sallow, emaciated, restless. His clothes, though not in rags, suggest poverty, and hang loosely from his shoul... more »ders and his hips. His trousers are baggy at the knees and slightly frayed at the ends. His coat is brown, and the nap of his old silk hat rubbed the wrong way. His boots are low on the outside of the heels. His necktie is carelessly tumbled and amply stained. His shirt and collar are never white. His waistcoat is blotched with various colours and worn at the button-holes. He has seen better days. He is now sixty, and quite alone in vast London. He has no relatives, no friends, no associates. No one around him knows his name. No one whom he meets has any hint of his history. He occupies a mean scantily-furnished room ina dirty street off Co vent Garden. He pays five shillings a week for that room, and is never an hour behindhand with the money. To be in arrear would be to court inquiry, and he desires of all things to avoid observation or questions. He has no property in that room except the simplest toilet appliances, and a few, very few, changes of linen. He has no spare boots, no spare clothes, no portmanteau, no box of any kind, no dressing-case; absolutely nothing beyond those toilet appliances, and those changes of linen ; he owns nothing in that room but an old dilapidated carpet-bag into which all his movables would fit, and the cost of which when new was three shillings. Every Saturday morning that five shillings is paid by him to the landlady. He never eats in the house. The landlady does not know his name ; she always alludes to him as " the gentleman in the top back." At first when he came she offered him a receipt for his rent, but when she asked him his name, he said : " Oh, you need not give yoursel...« less