Long Odds

DYM-STREET, Cavendish-square, was not a pleasant locality. No man with

ten thousand a year, unless he was a misanthrope, a miser, or a

political refugee, would willingly pitch his tent there.

In old days Dym-street had been a fashionable quarter. The long

link-extinguishers fastened over the rusty iron railings, attested that

gay meetings had been held in those dreary old houses; that fair women

had danced there; that Corydon, in a long skirted coat, had handed

Phillis, in hoop and powder, to her sedan, amid a crowd of shouting link

boys, and pushing chairmen.

The glory had departed from it now. The tall houses still remained, but

their dreary, dusty windows, and melancholy, sombre doors, had

desolation written in every pane and every panel. No well hung barouches

stood at its doorsteps. No coachman gorgeous in calves and wig, squared

his fat arms and pulled up his foaming horses, to permit Lady Lavinia or

Lady Florence to recount the triumphs of a drawing-room, or to seek

repose after the fatigues of a ball. To be sure, Lord Ballyragbag's

mansion was situated at one end of the street, but as his lordship was

always either in Paris or Hombourg (his creditors allowed him £200 a

year to keep out of the court), its presence did not confer much

practical honour on the neighbourhood. Dr. Sangrado possessed a funeral

looking establishment close at hand, an establishment termed by the

doctor a "sanatorium," but which, with its black door and stained brass

plate, had the appearance of a huge coffin set up on end.

Mr. Lurcher Demas, the popular (condemnatory) preacher, lived in

Dymstreet, and preached sulphuric sermons in the wooden church next to

the gin palace at the corner. The Hon. and Rev. Vere St. Simeon was

presumed to live there too, but his duties calling him frequently to

visit his uncle the Bishop and his father the Earl, the work of the

parish--not a small one--was performed by Mr. Paul Rendelsham, a haggard

and conscientious curate on £80 a year. Anthony Castcup, the banker,

resided in Dym-street. A rich man was Anthony, but having gout in every

place but his stomach, and being restricted by his doctors to half a

snipe and a pint of champagne per diem, he did not impart much

liveliness to the locality. Miss Lethbridge--a woman of vast wealth it

was reported--lived next door to the banker, and sent tender inquiries

after his health by her apoplectic servant; inquiries which, I grieve to

say, were responded to with ungrateful rumblings and groanings of a

comminatory sort, by the inaccessible Anthony. A struggling barrister,

with a family of fourteen, occupied a house over the way (it was all

that was left to him out of a law suit, which had amused his family for

thirty years); but his wife being delicate and the children given to

infantile ailments, the knocker was eternally enveloped in kid, and the

roadway covered with tan and straw, giving a casual passer-by the idea

that the Great Plague had made a special settlement there, and that the

dead-cart, "loud on the stone and low on the straw," was momentarily

expected.