old man seemed seldom or never to go out of doors, and on the other
hand to have almost no customers. He led a ghostlike existence between the
tiny, dark shop, and an even tinier back kitchen where he prepared his
meals and which contained, among other things, an unbelievably ancient
gramophone with an enormous horn. He seemed glad of the opportunity to
talk. Wandering about among his worthless stock, with his long nose and
thick spectacles and his bowed shoulders in the velvet jacket, he had
always vaguely the air of being a collector rather than a tradesman. With a
sort of faded enthusiasm he would finger this scrap of rubbish or that -- a
china bottle-stopper, the painted lid of a broken snuffbox, a pinchbeck
locket containing a strand of some long-dead baby's hair -- never asking
that Winston should buy it, merely that he should admire it. To talk to him
was like listening to the tinkling of a worn-out musical-box. He had
dragged out from the corners of his memory some more fragments of forgotten
rhymes. There was one about four and twenty blackbirds, and another about a
cow with a crumpled horn, and another about the death of poor Cock Robin.
'It just occurred to me you might be interested,' he would say with a
deprecating little laugh whenever he produced a new fragment. But he could
never recall more than a few lines of any one rhyme.
Both of them knew -- in a way, it was never out of their minds that
what was now happening could