The Project Gutenberg eBook, Mrs. Lirriper's Lodgings, by Charles Dickens

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Title: Mrs. Lirriper's Lodgings

Author: Charles Dickens

Release Date: April 4, 2005 [eBook #1416]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MRS. LIRRIPER'S LODGINGS***

Transcribed from the 1894 Chapman and Hall "Christmas Stories" edition by
David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk

MRS. LIRRIPER'S LODGINGS

CHAPTER I--HOW MRS. LIRRIPER CARRIED ON THE BUSINESS

Whoever would begin to be worried with letting Lodgings that wasn't a
lone woman with a living to get is a thing inconceivable to me, my dear;
excuse the familiarity, but it comes natural to me in my own little room,
when wishing to open my mind to those that I can trust, and I should be
truly thankful if they were all mankind, but such is not so, for have but
a Furnished bill in the window and your watch on the mantelpiece, and
farewell to it if you turn your back for but a second, however
gentlemanly the manners; nor is being of your own sex any safeguard, as I
have reason, in the form of sugar-tongs to know, for that lady (and a
fine woman she was) got me to run for a glass of water, on the plea of
going to be confined, which certainly turned out true, but it was in the
Station-house.

Number Eighty-one Norfolk Street, Strand--situated midway between the
City and St. James's, and within five minutes' walk of the principal
places of public amusement--is my address. I have rented this house many
years, as the parish rate-books will testify; and I could wish my
landlord was as alive to the fact as I am myself; but no, bless you, not
a half a pound of paint to save his life, nor so much, my dear, as a tile
upon the roof, though on your bended knees.

My dear, you never have found Number Eighty-one Norfolk Street Strand
advertised in Bradshaw's _Railway Guide_, and with the blessing of Heaven
you never will or shall so find it. Some there are who do not think it
lowering themselves to make their names that cheap, and even going the
lengths of a portrait of the house not like it with a blot in every
window and a coach and four at