The Theatre of Life Author:George Robert Sims General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1881 Original Publisher: John P. Fuller Subjects: Fiction / Classics Fiction / Historical Fiction / Literary Literary Criticism / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there m... more »ay be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: No. VI. A STRANGE JOURNEY. Old Mr. Twemlow was dead. He had saved his last sixpence, scraped his last rind of cheese so thin that you could see through it, his grasping hand had ceased to clutch the money bags that were dearer than life to him, and his covetous eyes were too fast shut ever to gloat over the golden drops that to him were the sweetest fruit upon the Tree of Life. He had driven his relatives from his door, he had shut himself in a tumbledown house at the East-end, which was his property, and which he was too mean to repair. When the last tenant left, and no other could be found to put up with broken windows, dirty walls, and a roof that had two slates broken for every whole one, Mr. Twemlow became his own tenant, as the only solution of the difficulty, and he ended his miserable life in squalor and discomfort, denying himself almost the necessaries of life at a time when, in cash and securities, he was worth more than a hundred thousand pounds. Down in the dirty little side street where he lived the later years of his life, he was known as Daddy Twemlow, and local gossip represented his wealth as fabulous. His bent figure and sallow, withered face were familiar to all the rude boys of the district, and when Daddy went out on his errands he had to run the gauntlet of their merciless chaff. Mr. Twemlow did not live alone. The kitchen floor ofthe tumbledown tenement was occupied by an old Irishwoman, Mrs. Bridget M...« less