Читать книгу Wrecked in Port. A Novel онлайн

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"My dear young fellow, you mistake me. If you do as I should like you, as an honest Englishman with a freeman's birthright, to do; if you do as I myself--old Jack Byrne, one of the prisoners of '48; 'Bitter Byrne,' as they call me at the club--if you do as I do, you'll hate the swells with all your heart, but you'll use 'em. When I was a young man, young and foolish, blind and headstrong, as all young men are, I wouldn't take off my cap to a swell, wouldn't take a swell's orders, wouldn't touch a swell's money! Lord bless you, I saw the folly of that years ago! I should have been starved long since if I hadn't. My business is bird-stuffing, as you may have heard or guessed; and where should I have been if I'd had to live upon all the orders for bird-stuffing I got from the labouring classes? They can't stuff themselves enough, let alone their birds! The swells want owls, and hawks, and pheasants, and what not, stuffed with outspread wings for fire-screens, but the poor people want the fire itself, and want it so badly that they never holloa for screens, and wouldn't use 'em if they had 'em. No, no; hate the swells, my boy, but use 'em. What have you been?"