I says in a whisper; ‘It’s all sutty.’ Then I see him smile, and he asked me how I was.
“‘Oh, there ain’t no bones broke,’ I says; ‘only Barkby’ll half kill me.’
“‘What for?’ says another gentleman.
“‘Why, coming down the wrong chimbley,’ I says; and then, warming up a bit with my wrongs, ‘But ’twarn’t my fault,’ I says. ‘Who could tell t’other from which, when there warn’t no numbers nor nothink on ’em, and they was all alike, so as you didn’t know which to come down, and him a swearing acause you was so long? Where is he?’ I says in a whisper.
“One looked at t’other, and there was six or seven people about me; for I was lying on the mattress put on the floor close aside a great hole in the wall, and a heap o’ bricks and mortar.
“‘Who?’ says the first gent, who was a doctor.
“‘Why, Barkby,’ I says; ‘my guv’nor, who sent me up number seven’s chimbley.’
“‘Oh, he’s not here,’ says someone. ‘This ain’t number seven; this is number ten. Send to seven,’ he says.
“Then they began talking a bit; and I heard something said about ‘poor boy,’ and ‘fearful groans,’ and ‘horrid position;’ and they thought I didn’t hear ’em, for I’d got my eyes shut, meaning to sham Abram when Barkby came, for fear he should hurt me; but I needn’t have shammed, for I couldn’t neither stand nor sit up for a week arter; and I believe arter all, it’s that has had something to do with me being so husky-voiced.
“Old Barkby never hit me a stroke, and I believe arter all he was sorry for me; but a sweep’s is a queer life even now, though afore the act was passed some poor boys was used cruel, and more than one got stuck in a floo, to be pulled out dead.”
Chapter Six.
My Sheffield Patient
Plenty of you know Sheffield by name; but I think those who know it by nature are few and far between. If you tried to give me your impressions of the place, you would most likely begin to talk of a black, smoky town, full of forges, factories, and furnaces, with steam blasts hissing, and Nasmyth hammers thudding and thundering all day long. But there you would stop, although you were right as far as you went. Let me say a little more, speaking as one who knows the place, and tell you that it lies snugly embosomed in glorious hills, curving and sweeping between which are some of the loveliest vales in England. The town is in parts dingy enough, and there is more smoke than is pleasant; but don’t imagine that all Sheffield’s sons are toiling continually in a choking atmosphere. There is a class of men – a large class, and one that has attained to a not very enviable notoriety in Sheffield – I mean the grinders – whose task is performed under far different circumstances; and when I describe one wheel, I am only painting one of hundreds clustering round the busy town, ready to sharpen and polish the blades for which Sheffield has long been famed.
Through every vale there flows a stream, fed by lesser rivulets, making their way down little valleys rich in wood and dell. Wherever such a streamlet runs trickling over the rocks, or bubbling amongst the stones, water rights have been established, hundreds of years old; busy hands have formed dams, and the pent-up water is used for turning some huge water-wheel, which in its turn sets in motion ten, twenty, or thirty stones in the long shed beside it, the whole being known in the district as “a wheel.”
One of my favourite walks lay along by a tiny bubbling brook, overhung with trees, up past wheel after wheel, following the streamlet towards its head, higher up the gorge through which it ran – a vale where you might stand and fancy yourself miles from man and his busy doings, as you listened to the silvery tinkle of the water playing amidst the pebbles, the sweet twittering song of birds overhead, or the hum of bees busy amidst the catkins and the blossoms; watched the flashing of the bright water as the sun glistened and darted amidst the leaves, till on the breeze would come the “plash, plash,” of the water-wheel, and the faintly-heard harsh “chir-r-r-r” of blade upon grindstone, When, recollecting that man was bound to earn his bread in the sweat of his brow, one would leave the beauties around, and hurry on to some visit.
I had a patient who used to work in one of those pleasant little vales – a patient to whom it fell to my lot to render, next to life, almost one of the greatest services man can render to man.
He was genial and patient, handsome too, and I used to think what a fine manly looking fellow he must have been before he suffered from the dastardly outrage of which he was the victim.
He was very low spirited during the early part of his illness and he used to talk to me in a quiet patient way about the valley, and I was surprised to find how fond he was of nature and its beauties, some of the sentiments that came from his lips being far above what one would have expected from such a man.
My bill, I am sorry to say, was a very long one with him, but he laughed and said that he had been a long patient.
“Why Doctor,” he said one evening many many months after his accident, and when he had quite recovered, and as he spoke he took his wife’s hand, “I shouldn’t have found fault if it had been twice as much. I only wish it was, and I had the money to pay you that or four times as much. But you haven’t made a very handsome job of me: has he, Jenny?”
There were tears in his wife’s eyes, though there was a smile upon her lip, and I knew that she was one who, as he told me, looked upon the heart.
“Ah, Doctor,” he said to me as he went over the troublous past, “it was very pleasant there working where you had only to lift your eyes from the wet whirling stone and look out of the open shed window at the bright blue sky and sunshine. There was not much listening to the birds there amongst the hurrying din of the rushing stones, and the chafing of band, and shriek of steel blade being ground; but the toil seemed pleasanter there, with nothing but the waving trees to stay the light of God’s sunshine, and I used to feel free and happy, and able to drink in long draughts of bright, pure air, whenever I straightened myself from my task, and gathered strength for the next spell.
“I could have been very happy there on that wheel, old and ramshackle place as it was, if people would only have let me. I was making a pretty good wage, and putting by a little every week, for at that time it had come into my head that I should like to take to myself a wife. Now, I’d lived nine-and-twenty years without such a thing coming seriously to mind, but one Sunday, when having a stroll out on the Glossop Road with John Ross – a young fellow who worked along with me – we met some one with her mother and father; and from that afternoon I was a changed man.
“I don’t know anything about beauty, and features, and that sort of thing; but I know that Jenny Lee’s face was the sweetest and brightest I ever saw; and for the rest of the time we were together I could do nothing but feast upon it with my eyes.
“John Ross knew the old people; and when I came to reckon afterwards, I could see plainly enough why my companion had chosen the Glossop Road: for they asked us to walk with them as far as their cottage, which was nigh at hand; and we did, and stayed to tea, and then they walked part of the way back in the cool of the evening. When we parted, and John Ross began to chatter about them, it seemed as if a dark cloud was settling down over my life, and that all around was beginning to look black and dismal.
“‘You’ll go with me again, Harry?’ he said to me as we parted. ‘I shan’t wait till Sunday, but run over on Wednesday night.’
“‘I don’t know, I’ll see,’ I said; and then we parted.
“I
