Читать книгу Charles Peace, or The Adventures of a Notorious Burglar онлайн

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One print, entitled the “Labourers’ Best Friends,” was greatly admired by the frequenters of the “Old Carved Lion.”

The subjects represented were a substantial piece of fat bacon, a quartern loaf, half a cheese, a foaming tankard of ale, and a clay pipe.

“Ah, that be summut loike,” exclaimed several, “I call that wonderfully natural, as real as life itself; I should loike to ha’ that. How much be it, measter?”

“Cheap enough,” answered Peace, “only half-a-crown.”

“Umph, I wish it was in a frame.”

“I’ll undertake to frame any of my prints at cost price.”

“Do un, now?”

“Yes, you can have a frame from a shilling to a sovereign-according to the quality.”

“I’ll come and sit by you,” said Nell to Peace, “because you are a clever man, I’m thinking.”

“I am very much flattered, I am sure,” he answered with a smirk.

“So un ought to be,” said another of the company, “it aint many as Nell condescends to flatter.”

A young peasant and peasantess as Mark Twain would say, making eyes at one another after the approved fashion, attracted the young woman’s attention.