ps things are better now that lamps light themselves
instinctively at the official hour of sunset. At any rate, one has the
satisfaction of occasionally seeing one that won't go out, but burns on
into the daylight to spite the Authorities.

They were cold stars, almost green, that this lamplighter dropped; but
this was because the sun had left a flood of orange-gold behind it,
enough to make the tune from "Rigoletto" an organ was playing think it
was being composed in Italy again. The world was a peaceful world,
because Opulence, inflated and moderate, had gone out of town: the
former to its country-house, or a foreign hotel; the latter to lodgings
at the seaside to bathe out of machines and prey on shrimps. The lull
that reigned in and about Sapps Court was no doubt a sort of recoil or
backwater from other neighbourhoods, with high salaries or real and
personal estate, whose dwellings were closed and not being properly
ventilated by their caretakers. It reacted on business there, every bit
as much as in Oxford Street; and that was how Tapping's the
tallow-chandler's--where you got tallow candles and dips, as well as
composites; for in those days they still chandled tallow--didn't have a
single customer in for ten whole minutes by the clock. In that interval
Mrs. Tapping seized the opportunity to come out in the street and
breathe the air. So did Mrs. Riley next door, and they stood conversing
on the topics of the day, looking at the sunset over the roofs of the
_cul-de-sac_ this story has reference to. For Mrs. Tapping's shop was in
the main road, opposite to where the embankment operations were in hand.

"Ye never will be tellin' me now, Mrs. Tapping, that ye've not hur-r-rd
thim calling 'Fire!' in the sthrate behind? Fy-urr, fy-urr, fy-urr!"
This is hard to write as Mrs. Riley spoke it, so great was her command
of the letter _r_.

"Now you name it, Mrs. Riley, deny it I can't. But to the point of
taking notice to bear in mind--why no! It was on my ears, but only to be
let slip that minute. Small amounts and accommodations frequent, owing
to reductions on quantity took, distrack attention. I was a-sayin' to my
stepdaughter only the other day that hearin' is one thing and listenin'
is another. And she says to me, she says, I was talking like a book, she
says. Her very expression and far from respectful! So I says to her, not
to be put upon, 'Lethear,' I says, 'books ain't similar all through but
to seleck from, and I