, Wine Merchants. Even that commerce was but
occasional, and through three-fourths of its rising tides the dirty
indecorous drab of a river would come solitarily oozing and lapping at
the rusty ring, as if it had heard of the Doge and the Adriatic, and
wanted to be married to the great conserver of its filthiness, the Right
Honourable the Lord Mayor.
Some two hundred and fifty yards on the right, up the opposite hill
(approaching it from the low ground of Break-Neck-Stairs) was Cripple
Corner. There was a pump in Cripple Corner, there was a tree in Cripple
Corner. All Cripple Corner belonged to Wilding and Co., Wine Merchants.
Their cellars burrowed under it, their mansion towered over it. It
really had been a mansion in the days when merchants inhabited the City,
and had a ceremonious shelter to the doorway without visible support,
like the sounding-board over an old pulpit. It had also a number of long
narrow strips of window, so disposed in its grave brick front as to
render it symmetrically ugly. It had also, on its roof, a cupola with a
bell in it.
"When a man at five-and-twenty can put his hat on, and can say 'this hat
covers the owner of this property and of the business which is transacted
on this property,' I consider, Mr. Bintrey, that, without being boastful,
he may be allowed to be deeply thankful. I don't know how it may appear
to you, but so it appears to me."
Thus Mr. Walter Wilding to his man of law, in his own counting-house;
taking his hat down from its peg to suit the action to the word, and
hanging it up again when he had done so, not to overstep the modesty of
nature.
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