urn 462
XXXII. The Closing Scene 472

EPOCH THE FIRST.

1703.

JONATHAN WILD.

JACK SHEPPARD.

CHAPTER I.

The Widow and her Child.

On the night of Friday, the 26th of November, 1703, and at the hour of
eleven, the door of a miserable habitation, situated in an obscure
quarter of the Borough of Southwark, known as the Old Mint, was opened;
and a man, with a lantern in his hand, appeared at the threshold. This
person, whose age might be about forty, was attired in a brown
double-breasted frieze coat, with very wide skirts, and a very narrow
collar; a light drugget waistcoat, with pockets reaching to the knees;
black plush breeches; grey worsted hose; and shoes with round toes,
wooden heels, and high quarters, fastened by small silver buckles. He
wore a three-cornered hat, a sandy-coloured scratch wig, and had a thick
woollen wrapper folded round his throat. His clothes had evidently seen
some service, and were plentifully begrimed with the dust of the
workshop. Still he had a decent look, and decidedly the air of one
well-to-do in the world. In stature, he was short and stumpy; in person,
corpulent; and in countenance, sleek, snub-nosed, and demure.

Immediately behind this individual, came a pale, poverty-stricken woman,
whose forlorn aspect contrasted strongly with his plump and comfortable
physiognomy. She was dressed in a tattered black stuff gown, discoloured
by various stains, and intended, it would seem, from the remnants of
rusty crape with which it was here and there tricked out, to represent
the garb of widowhood, and held in her arms a sleeping infant, swathed
in the folds of a linsey-woolsey shawl.

Notwithstanding her emaciation, her features still retained something
of a pleasing expression, and might have been termed beautiful, had it
not been for that repulsive freshness of lip denoting the habitual
dram-drinker; a freshness in her case rendered the more shocking from
the almost livid hue of the rest of her complexion. She could not be
more than twenty; and though want and other suffering had done the work
of time, had wasted her frame, and robbed her cheek of its bloom and
roundness, they had not extinguished the lustre of her eyes, nor thinned
her raven hair. Checking an ominous cough, that, ever and anon,
convulsed her lungs, the poor woman addressed a few parting words to her
companion, who lingered at the doorway as if he had something