eople's noses; 't ain't their heyes or their hears I'm
hafter," he says, though the neat stall makes its own claim on the
"heyes."

In another alley is another pea-soup man, one-legged, but not at all
depressed by this or any other circumstance of fate. He makes, or his
wife makes, the pea soup at home, and he keeps it hot by means of a
charcoal fire in two old tin saucepans.

"Hard work?" he says. "You wouldn't think so if you'd been on your back
seven months and four days in Middlesex Orspital. I was a coal heaver,
and going along easy and natural over the plank from one barge to
another, and there come the swell from some steamers and throwed up the
plank and chucked me off, and I broke my knee against the barge. It's
bad now. I'd ought to 'ad it hoff, an' so the surgeons said; but I
wouldn't, an' me wife wouldn't, and the bone keeps workin' out, and I've
'ad nineteen months all told in the 'orspital, and Lord knows how me
wife and the young uns got on. I was bad enough off, I was, till a
neighbor o' mine, a master butcher, told me there was a man up in Clare
Market, makin' a fortune at hot eels and pea soup, and he lent me ten
shillings to start in that line. He and me wife's the best friends I've
ever had in the world; for I've no memory of a mother, and me father
died at sea. My oldest daughter, she's a good un, goes for the eels and
cuts 'em up, and she an' me wife does all the hard work. I've only to
sit at the stall and sell, and they do make 'em tasty. There's no
better. But we're hard up. I'd do better if I'd a little more money to
buy with. I can't get a draught like some of the men, and them that gets
by the quantity can give more. The boys tells me there's one man gives
'em as much as eight pieces; that's what they calls a lumping
ha'p'worth. And the liquor's richer when you boils up so many eels.
What's my tin pot ag'in' his five-gallon one? There's even some that
boils the 'eads, and sells 'em for a farthing a cupful; but I've not
come to that. But we're badly off. The missus has a pair o' shoes, and
she offs with 'em when my daughter goes to market, and my boy the
youngest 's got no shoes; but we do very well, and would do better, only
the cheap pie shop takes off a lot o' trade. I wouldn't eat them pies.
It's the dead eels that goes into 'em, and we that handles eels knows
well enough that they're rank poison if they ain't cut up alive, and the
flesh of 'em squirming still when they goes into the boil