I like no end tellin' this tale." Harold the Broomstick was desultorily sweeping the stairs.

He worked harder when first conscious of being watched, but seeing that they intended to stay there, on the top step, he made this the excuse to disappear indolently, leaving little heaps of dust on several of the lower steps.
"I come across Elbert first when I was about eight an' twenty," said Peony, when Sarah Brown, in rather a loud dressing-gown, had taken her seat on the stairs beside her.

"Elbert was the ideel kid, an' me--nothing to speak of.

Nothin' more than a lump o' mud, I use to say.
All my life, if you'll believe me, cully, I've lived in mud--an' kep' me eye on the moon, so to say.

I worked in a factory all day, makin' mud, as it were, for muddy Jews, an' every Saturday night I took 'ome twelve shillin's-worth o' mud to keep meself alive in a city o' mud until the Saturday after.