"He had only a saw, a hammer, and some sandpaper," she said, nodding at the furniture, "and he made the lot."
They were well-built, and calculated to bear even Mrs. Pinchbeck. "Vermilion red was his favourite colour," she said, "and he thought the bright yellow of the nails livened them up. They had been made a good many years, but he sometimes gave them a fresh coat of paint."
Pinchbeck and she had been married many years; they had no children. They lived by themselves, and he was a very good husband. But there were other wonders in the room beside the poor woman and the brilliant furniture, and they soon claimed attention.
In front of me stood a monumental cross some feet in height, and made apparently of brown marble. The cross stood on three foundation steps of brown marble, and at intervals round the body of the cross were bands of yellow ribbon.
She saw me looking at it. "That's all tobacco," she said; "it is made of cigar-ends." There was a descriptive paper attached to the cross. "Jonathan collected the cigar-ends, and he made them into that monument, and he made the calculations in his head, and I wrote them down," she said, referring to the paper. "He walked more than ninety thousand miles to collect the cigar-ends," she said. I asked permission to read the descriptive paper attached, and after permission--for I saw the whole thing was sacred to the suffering woman--I detached it. I was lost in interest as I read the paper, which was well written, and contained some curious calculations. I found on inquiry that Jonathan could neither read nor write, but he could, as she said, "calculate in his own head."
The document consisted of a double sheet of foolscap, which was covered on the four pages with writing and figures in a woman's hand. Briefly it told of the great deeds of Jonathan, who, as I have previously said, was a dock-labourer. He had lived in Clapton Park for more than thirty years, and he had walked every day to and from the East London Docks, a five-mile tramp every morning, and a return journey at night of equal length. Hundreds of times his journey had been fruitless, so far as getting a day's work was concerned; but, like an industrious bee, Jonathan returned home every night laden with what to him was sweeter than honey--cigar-ends that he had gathered from the pavements, gutters, and streets he traversed and searched during his daily ten-mile tramp. They lay before me, converted into a massive monumental cross, erected upon three great slabs of similar material. On each side of it stood a smaller cross, as if it were to show off the dimensions of the great cross. The paper stated that the whole of the cigar-ends collected weighed one hundredweight and three-quarters. It also told how far the cigars would have reached had they been placed end to end; one cigar was reckoned at three inches, four to a foot, twelve to a yard, and seven thousand and forty to a mile. The paper also told how much they cost at twopence each, how long they took to smoke at one half-hour each, also how much duty the Government had received on each at four shillings per pound. Thirty years of interminable tramping, with his eyes on the ground like a sleuth-hound, had Jonathan done. Hour after hour he had sat in his little home contemplating his collection, and making his mental calculations while his wife wrote them down, and then in its glory arose his great monument.