He Bates A Little, But Not So Much As The Klings,
Who Almost Always Ask Twice What They Are Willing To Take.
If you
buy a few things from him, he will speak to you afterwards every
time you pass his
Shop, asking you to walk in and sit down, or
take a cup of tea; and you wonder how he can get a living where
so many sell the same trifling articles.
The tailors sit at a table, not on one; and both they and the
shoemakers work well and cheaply. The barbers have plenty to do,
shaving heads and cleaning ears; for which latter operation they
have a great array of little tweezers, picks, and brushes. In the
outskirts of the town are scores of carpenters and blacksmiths.
The former seem chiefly to make coffins and highly painted and
decorated clothes-boxes. The latter are mostly gun-makers, and
bore the barrels of guns by hand out of solid bars of iron. At
this tedious operation they may be seen every day, and they
manage to finish off a gun with a flintlock very handsomely. All
about the streets are sellers of water, vegetables, fruit, soup,
and agar-agar (a jelly made of seaweed), who have many cries as
unintelligible as those of London. Others carry a portable
cooking-apparatus on a pole balanced by a table at the other end,
and serve up a meal of shellfish, rice, and vegetables for two or
three halfpence - while coolies and boatmen waiting to be hired
are everywhere to be met with.
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