| |
| | “O where, and O where |
| Is my bonnie laddie gone?” |
| —OLD SONG. |
ONE day, as I was going by | |
| That part of Holborn christened High, | |
| I heard a loud and sudden cry | |
| That chilled my very blood; | |
| And lo! from out a dirty alley, | 5 |
| Where pigs and Irish wont to rally, | |
| I saw a crazy woman sally, | |
| Bedaubed with grease and mud. | |
| She turned her East, she turned her West, | |
| Staring like Pythoness possest, | 10 |
| With streaming hair and heaving breast, | |
| As one stark mad with grief. | |
| This way and that she wildly ran, | |
| Jostling with woman and with man,— | |
| Her right hand held a frying-pan, | 15 |
| The left a lump of beef. | |
| At last her frenzy seemed to reach | |
| A point just capable of speech, | |
| And with a tone almost a screech, | |
| As wild as ocean bird’s, | 20 |
| Or female ranter moved to preach, | |
| She gave her “sorrow words.” | |
| “O Lord! O dear, my heart will break, I shall go stick stark staring wild! | |
| Has ever a one seen anything about the streets like a crying lost-looking child? | |
| Lawk help me, I don’t know where to look, or to run, if I only knew which way— | 25 |
| A Child as is lost about London streets, and especially Seven Dials, is a needle in a bottle of hay. | |
| I am all in a quiver—get out of my sight, do, you wretch, you little Kitty M’Nab! | |
| You promised to have half an eye to him, you know you did, you dirty deceitful young drab. | |
| The last time as ever I see him, poor thing, was with my own blessed Motherly eyes, | |
| Sitting as good as gold in the gutter, a playing at making little dirt-pies. | 30 |
| I wonder he left the court, where he was better off than all the other young boys, | |
| With two bricks, an old shoe, nine oyster-shells, and a dead kitten by way of toys. | |
| When his father comes home, and he always comes home as sure as ever the clock strikes one, | |
| He ’ll be rampant, he will, at his child being lost; and the beef and the inguns not done! | |
| La bless you, good folks, mind your own concerns, and don’t be making a mob in the street; | 35 |
| O Sergeant M’Farlane! you have not come across my poor little boy, have you, in your beat? | |
| Do, good people, move on! don’t stand staring at me like a parcel of stupid stuck pigs; | |
| Saints forbid! but he ’s p’r’aps been inviggled away up a court for the sake of his clothes by the priggs; | |
| He ’d a very good jacket, for certain, for I bought it myself for a shilling one day in Rag Fair; | |
| And his trousers considering not very much patched, and red plush, they was once his Father’s best pair. | 40 |
| His shirt, it ’s very lucky I ’d got washing in the tub, or that might have gone with the rest; | |
| But he ’d got on a very good pinafore with only two slits and a burn on the breast. | |
| He ’d a goodish sort of hat, if the crown was sewed in, and not quite so much jagged at the brim. | |
| With one shoe on, and the other shoe is a boot, and not a fit, and you ’ll know by that if it ’s him. | |
| Except being so well dressed, my mind would misgive, some old beggar woman, in want of an orphan, | 45 |
| Had borrowed the child to go a-begging with, but I ’d rather see him laid out in his coffin! | |
| Do, good people, move on, such a rabble of boys! I ’ll break every bone of ’em I come near, | |
| Go home—you ’re spilling the porter—go home—Tommy Jones, go along home with your beer. | |
| This day is the sorrowfullest day of my life, ever since my name was Betty Morgan. | |
| Them vile Savoyards! they lost him once before all along of following a monkey and an organ: | 50 |
| O my Billy—my head will turn right round—if he ’s got kiddynapped with them Italians. | |
| They ’ll make him a plaster parish image boy, they will, the outlandish tatterdemalions. | |
| Billy—where are you, Billy?—I ’m as hoarse as a crow, with screaming for ye, you young sorrow! | |
| And sha’n’t have half a voice, no more I sha’n’t, for crying fresh herrings to-morrow. | |
| O Billy, you ’re bursting my heart in two, and my life won’t be of no more vally, | 55 |
| If I ’m to see other folks’ darlin’s, and none of mine, playing like angels in our alley, | |
| And what shall I do but cry out my eyes, when I looks at the old three-legged chair | |
| As Billy used to make coach and horses of, and there a’n’t no Billy there! | |
| I would run all the wide world over to find him, if I only knowed where to run. | |
| Little Murphy, now I remember, was once lost for a month through stealing a penny bun,— | 60 |
| The Lord forbid of any child of mine! I think it would kill me raily, | |
| To find my Bill holdin’ up his little innocent hand at the Old Bailey. | |
| For though I say it as oughtn’t, yet I will say, you may search for miles and mileses | |
| And not find one better brought up, and more pretty behaved, from one end to t’ other of St. Giles’s. | |
| And if I called him a beauty, it ’s no lie, but only as a mother ought to speak; | 65 |
| You never set eyes on a more handsomer face, only it hasn’t been washed for a week; | |
| As for hair, though it ’s red, it ’s the most nicest hair when I ’ve time to just show it the comb; | |
| I ’ll owe ’em five pounds, and a blessing besides, as will bring him safe and sound home. | |
| He ’s blue eyes, and not to be called a squint, though a little cast he ’s certainly got; | |
| And his nose is still a good un, though the bridge is broke, by his falling on a pewter pint pot; | 70 |
| He ’s got the most elegant wide mouth in the world, and very large teeth for his age; | |
| And quite as fit as Mrs. Murdockson’s child to play Cupid on the Drury Lane stage. | |
| And then he has got such dear winning ways—but O, I never, never shall see him no more! | |
| O dear! to think of losing him just after nussing him back from death’s door! | |
| Only the very last month when the windfalls, hang ’em, was at twenty a penny! | 75 |
| And the threepence he ’d got by grottoing was spent in plums, and sixty for a child is too many. | |
| And the Cholera man came and whitewashed us all, and, drat him! made a seize of our hog.— | |
| It ’s no use to send the Crier to cry him about, he ’s such a blunderin’ drunken old dog; | |
| The last time he was fetched to find a lost child he was guzzling with his bell at the Crown, | |
| And went and cried a boy instead of a girl, for a distracted Mother and Father about Town. | 80 |
| Billy—where are you, Billy, I say? come, Billy, come home, to your best of Mothers! | |
| I ’m scared when I think of them Cabroleys, they drive so, they ’d run over their own Sisters and Brothers. | |
| Or maybe he ’s stole by some chimney-sweeping wretch, to stick fast in narrow flues and what not, | |
| And be poked up behind with a picked pointed pole, when the soot has ketched, and the chimbley’s red hot. | |
| O, I ’d give the whole wide world, if the world was mine, to clap my two longin’ eyes on his face. | 85 |
| For he ’s my darlin’ of darlin’s, and if he don’t soon come back, you ’ll see me drop stone dead on the place. | |
| I only wish I ’d got him safe in these two Motherly arms, and wouldn’t I hug him and kiss him! | |
| Lawk! I never knew what a precious he was—but a child don’t not feel like a child till you miss him. | |
| Why, there he is! Punch and Judy hunting, the young wretch, it ’s that Billy as sartin as sin! | |
| But let me get him home, with a good grip of his hair, and I ’m blest if he shall have a whole bone in his skin!” | 90 |
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