[Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray]@TWC D-Link bookVanity Fair CHAPTER XVII 6/14
As for one dozen well-manufactured silver spoons and forks at per oz., and one dozen dessert ditto ditto, there were three young stockbrokers (Messrs.
Dale, Spiggot, and Dale, of Threadneedle Street, indeed), who, having had dealings with the old man, and kindnesses from him in days when he was kind to everybody with whom he dealt, sent this little spar out of the wreck with their love to good Mrs.Sedley; and with respect to the piano, as it had been Amelia's, and as she might miss it and want one now, and as Captain William Dobbin could no more play upon it than he could dance on the tight rope, it is probable that he did not purchase the instrument for his own use. In a word, it arrived that evening at a wonderful small cottage in a street leading from the Fulham Road--one of those streets which have the finest romantic names--( this was called St.Adelaide Villas, Anna-Maria Road West), where the houses look like baby-houses; where the people, looking out of the first-floor windows, must infallibly, as you think, sit with their feet in the parlours; where the shrubs in the little gardens in front bloom with a perennial display of little children's pinafores, little red socks, caps, &c.
(polyandria polygynia); whence you hear the sound of jingling spinets and women singing; where little porter pots hang on the railings sunning themselves; whither of evenings you see City clerks padding wearily: here it was that Mr.Clapp, the clerk of Mr.Sedley, had his domicile, and in this asylum the good old gentleman hid his head with his wife and daughter when the crash came. Jos Sedley had acted as a man of his disposition would, when the announcement of the family misfortune reached him.
He did not come to London, but he wrote to his mother to draw upon his agents for whatever money was wanted, so that his kind broken-spirited old parents had no present poverty to fear.
This done, Jos went on at the boarding-house at Cheltenham pretty much as before.
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