“Yes, commander, I took the business. Such as it was. It wasn’t much of a beat — round Saffron Hill, Hatton Garden, Clerkenwell, Smiffeld, and there — poor neighbourhood, where they uses up the kettles till they’re past mending. Most of the tramping tinkers used to come and lodge at our place; that was the best part of my master’s earnings. But they didn’t come to me. I warn’t like him. He could sing ’em a good song. I couldn’t! He could play ’em a tune on any sort of pot you please, so as it was iron or block tin. I never could do nothing with a pot, but mend it or bile it — never had a note of music in me. Besides, I was too ill-looking, and their wives complained of me.”
Block tin (Metal.), commercial tin, cast into blocks, and
partially refined, but containing small quantities of
various impurities, as copper, lead, iron, arsenic, etc.;
solid tin as distinguished from tin plate; -- called also
bar tin.
The house I was born in had a block tin pipe from the well to the kitchen, much more prestigious than the lead pipes so many old houses used to have. But long before I was born, town water mains brought the water we used, and the tin was sold to a horse and buggy scrap metal dealer.
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