Junk

“ Alterations of sails and rigging, and no end of small jobs, keep us hard at work till eight bells (noon) once more strike, and we then get our luxurious dinner of a pound and a half of salt junk, with biscuits. But junk is capital stuff for sheathing material, when it is good: unfortunately, however, it too frequently is 'old horse;' and whatever its quality happens to be, all the nice juicy pieces are invariably picked out for the cabin table. Anything will do for poor Jack. ”

“ For material, they use odds and ends of old rigging called “junk,” the yarns of which are picked to pieces, and then twisted into new combinations, something as most books are manufactured. This “junk” is bought at the junk shops along the wharves; outlandish looking dens, generally subterranean, full of old iron, old shrouds, spars, rusty blocks, and superannuated tackles; and kept by villainous looking old men, in tarred trowsers, and with yellow beards like oakum. ”

“ The junk was one of the largest I had ever seen, and, like most of her class, appeared to be all masts, sails, and stern. The crew were as usual very numerous, and a more evil-looking lot no one could possibly wish to set eyes on; the face of one little pock-marked fellow being particularly distasteful to me. ”

“ Poor cheap human nature! Twelve years I’ve roughed it in shacks and junks, a flannel shirt to my back, and pork and beans or rice and fish in my stomach; while he has sat beneath the oaks we played under in our childhood, and has slept in the panelled rooms of our home, and has held the woman he stole from me in his arms! Talk of family affection! ”

“ The crook of a hungry finger will bring him to a stand. Or a junkman is below upon his business. Yesterday the bells upon his cart would have sounded sour, but this morning they rattle agreeably, as though a brisker cow than common, springtime in her hoofs, were jangling to her pasture. At the sound—if you are of country training—you see yourself, somewhat misty through the years, barefoot in a grassy lane, with stick in hand, urging the gentle beast. There is a subtle persuasion in the junkman's call. In these tones did the magician, bawling for old lamps, beguile Aladdin. ”

“ In the picture, the little boats belong to poor people, but the big ones, called 'junks,' belong to folks who are better off. Sometimes junks are used by rich people for traveling, and then they are built almost as roomy, and fitted up quite as comfortably, as the homes on shore. ”

“ Imagine—unhappily you need exercise no great stretch of the faculty, the papers teem with too many instances—imagine a poor, woe-begone, miserable creature, destitute and friendless, without a home, without a meal; his tattered clothing displaying through every rent the shrunken form and wasted limbs to which hunger and want have reduced him. See him as night falls, plodding onwards through the crowded thoroughfares of the great city; his lack-lustre eye glazed and filmy; his pale face and blue lip actually corpse-like in their ghastliness. ”

“ And somehow the beginning of a voyage seemed to be always in westerly weather, at the beginning of winter. The English land to me is a twilight coast with clouds like iron above it poised in a windy light of aquamarine, and a sunset of lucid saffron. Against that western light, bright, bare, and penetrating as the ruthless judgment of impersonal divinity, the polished waves mount, outlined as hard as jet, and move towards us. The ship's prow rises to cut out segments of the west; falls into the dark hollows of waves. The wind pours over us, an icy and ponderable flood, and is increasing. ”

“ I get so bored with ordering three meals a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year, and ruining my eyes over that horrid sewing-machine, and looking after your clothes and Rone's and Ted's and Tinka's and everybody's, and the laundry, and darning socks, and going down to the Piggly Wiggly to market, and bringing my basket home to save money on the cash-and-carry and—everything! ”

“ Even now when part of our food passes into ordure, part into blood, part into spurious and useless phlegm, we are nevertheless so addicted to luxury, that we spend perhaps whole estates on a meal. What should we not do, if this were not the end of luxury? The more luxuriously we live, the more noisome are the odors with which we are filled. The body is like a swollen bottle, running out every way. ”

“ I have often wished I had been the son of a carter, had been beaten and knocked about, and forced to work for my bread, instead of this glittering misery, in which I starve one day and live in luxury the next. ”

“ Even all these toilers of the luxury, pleasure, and intoxication of life, these humble, unknown workers were there in cast-off clothes, with faces still pale from interrupted sleep, with the tired air of those who are deprived of rest ”

“ I thought, not unbitterly, of the thousands of silly men and women, who squandered on luxury for mere luxury's sake, or hoarded for mere hoarding's sake, that which would enable me ... Then it struck me that sometimes men starved.—The thought seemed like a cruel being of darkness. I looked up sharply, almost hearing a sort of clang of its departing wings. And there arose a circling black cloud, from the outer dark-smokiness of which many, many eyes looked at me, the eyes of the many, many men who had struggled and perished. ”

“ I think most of the clothes ugly and dirty, most of the food bad, the houses wretched, the schools starved and feeble, the amusements dull, the monetary methods silly, our ways of trading base and wasteful, our methods of production piecemeal and wasteful, our political arrangements solemnly idiotic. Most of my activities have been to get my soul and something of my body out of the customs, outlook, boredoms, and contaminations of the current phase of life. ”

“ Some idea of its splendor has already been given—and, it is here that we shall find that height of luxury which is the opposite of that depth of poverty and physical wretchedness that we have just now been contemplating. ”

“ I ordered it to be repaired, bought some furniture, and took possession; an incident which would, doubtless, have occasioned some surprise, had not all the senses of the cottagers been benumbed by want and squalid poverty. As it was, I lived ungazed at and unmolested, hardly thanked for the pittance of food and clothes which I gave; so much does suffering blunt even the coarsest sensations of men. ”

“ But go ye also in the rear of her, and keep every body in his sleep and his rest, in prosperity and comfort, abundance and carelessness; and then you will see the poor honest man, as soon as he shall drink of the alluring cup of Ease, become a perverse, proud, untractable churl—the industrious labourer change into a careless, waggish rattler—and every other person become just what you would desire him. ”

“ I saw one man hiding some of the bread I had given him under his coat, and the man, being run down to skin and bone for want of food, I was surprised at his not eating it all, but he told me that he had a child at home starving, and there was nothing in the house to sell for food. ”

“ I trembled to think what a nature I should soon be confronted with, and how terrible must be the temper of a man whose resentments asked for such aliment to maintain them! I stole away abashed at my own intrusiveness, and feeling that I was rightfully punished by the misery that overwhelmed me. How differently now did all the splendor appear to me as I retraced my steps! how defiantly I gazed on that magnificence which seemed to insult the poverty I had just quitted! ”

“ On the contrary, when a poor Man appears, the disagreeable Images of Want, Penury, hard Labour, dirty Furniture, coarse or ragged Cloaths, nauseous Meat and distasteful Liquor, immediately strike our Fancy. ”

“ A word to the 35,000 now tramping the streets of this great city, with hands in pockets, gazing listlessly about you at the evidence of wealth and pleasure of which you own no part, not sufficient even to purchase yourself a bit of food with which to appease the pangs of hunger now knawing at your vitals. ”

“ The brain is weary to the straining point. Nothing but abject poverty, cruel, gaunt want stares me in the face. Can I see my loved ones hungry without a roof to shelter them? I am penniless. The tradesmen will give no further credit. ”

“ Presently, in one of those sudden blanks of general talk that surprise the unwary, his raised voice was heard to say—
“——Consequence is that the few revel in luxury, while the many——” He hesitated, and went on floundering through the silence. “Whilst the many 'ave not the wherewithal to buy their daily bread.” ”

“ But what good would it be to you there? That is a land in which money cannot buy anything. Woe to you, then, if you have made no other provision for the road; you shalt surely suffer eternal hunger and thirst! ”

“ I will not feed my body with impure food—is it not of infinitely more importance that I should not feed my spirit with deeds of impurity? By this I mean my gaining a living by making and selling articles which, in my judgment, are injurious, being luxurious and altogether unnecessary. ”

“ But the man shook his head and a dark look came down upon his idle, pretty face, and he said with bitterness, “I have nothing wherewith to buy myself anything in this house. Work I have and nothing else, and all I gain for it is more to feed, the more I work.” ”

“ Is it wonderful that, wanting coals or something better than dry bread, the shirt or the waistcoat should be pawned? Is it not more wonderful that such bleak and hopeless poverty should be so honest as it is? ”

“ The poor creatures working thirteen hours a day, had no time to think of their toilet. Now, they are out of work and have time to rustle in the silks they have made. Ever since they lost their milk teeth they have devoted themselves to your fortune and have lived in abstinence. Now they are at leisure and wish to enjoy a little of the fruits of their labor. ”

“ Every man of them is now a beggar, compared with what he was then. Many are dead in the prime of life of consumption, bad food and lodging, and the peculiar diseases of our trade. Some have not been heard of lately—we fancy them imprisoned in some sweaters' dens—but thereby hangs a tale, whereof more hereafter. ”

“ But, alas! for the vanity of all, or at least some, human calculations, an event occurred which completely upset all my nicely laid plans for the future, and rendered it indispensably necessary for me to put my shoulder to the wheel in good earnest, and not trouble myself about the propriety of feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, comforting the afflicted, and so on. But to explain. My father was chief partner in a large mercantile house, whose principal warehouses were situated in Thames Street, City. ”

“ The most costly and tempting wares are displayed in the shops in clothing, food, and all the necessities of life, as well as fantastic luxuries and superfluities in the greatest profusion—"things that nobody wants made to give to people who have no use for them"—yet, necessities or not, removed only by the thickness of the plate-glass from the famished eyes of penury and want. ”

“ We passed the bounds of Nature, and launched out into superfluities; insomuch, that it is now-a-days only for beggars and clowns to content themselves with what is sufficient; our luxury makes us insolent and mad. ”

“ When we are disposed, therefore, under the appellation of luxury, to rank the enjoyment of these things among the vices, we either tacitly refer to the habits of sensuality, debauchery, prodigality, vanity, and arrogance, with which the possession of high fortune is sometimes attended; or we apprehend a certain measure of what is necessary to human life, beyond which all enjoyments are supposed to be excessive and vicious. ”

“ To such an extreme had luxury been carried that nothing was too sacred, nothing too costly to be enjoyed. Digestion had become a science, courtship an art, sleep a nightmare, comfort an accomplishment, and the very act of living an industry. ”

“ A few months' want of work, with their little stock of shop stuff oozing away—partly on credit to their poor neighbours, and partly to live upon themselves —and they become destitute of all, except a few beggarly remnants of empty shop furniture. ”

“ Ay, ay, 'tis the rich face that keeps us from poverty. If the tailor's countenance were in fashion now, and all that had fiery faces were counted comets, what a decay would there be amongst our houses of good fellowship. How our cans would rot and jugs grow musty for want of use! I would the whole city were jugs and cans, that they might never be in good case but when they're full of good liquor. ”

“ I found you drunk in my birch, and it is well known that these are your customary habits. You are also a pauper. All property, everything that goes to support life, in these parts, of any amount, comes by the hard work of somebody,—either bone labor or brain labor,—the labor of those who now possess it, or of those from whom they inherited it. ”

“ You throw away your working clothes and dress yourselves in silk; you deck yourselves with silver and gold ornaments, and you sit on soft-cushioned sofas. Think how long these luxuries would last—a month perhaps, at the most a year. Then the rich man's wine is all drunk, and his larder empty, the silk clothes are worn out, and the sofas torn; you cannot eat precious stones and gold, and if you do not mean to starve you must begin working again, and after the extermination of the rich man and the division of his property you are exactly in the position you were in before. ”

“ And if not a rich man, I shall be very comfortably off. Whatever luxuries you may need in the future will not have to be schemed for. My dear girl, will you order a chicken and some salad and a pint of some good dry champagne to be brought here? I'm particularly ravenous with hunger. Wonderful how one's appetite comes back when you get your mind free from worry. And to think of those concessions being of that value, after all. ”