The brisk little crutch-stick was but too brisk. “O gentlemen, gentlemen, he belongs to me!”
“Belongs to you?” said the head of the party, stopping it.
“O yes, dear gentlemen, he’s my child, out without leave. My poor bad, bad boy! and he don’t know me, he don’t know me! O what shall I do,” cried the little creature, wildly beating her hands together, “when my own child don’t know me!”
The head of the party looked (as well he might) to the old man for explanation. He whispered, as the dolls’ dressmaker bent over the exhausted form and vainly tried to extract some sign of recognition from it: “It’s her drunken father.”
As the load was put down in the street, Riah drew the head of the party aside, and whispered that he thought the man was dying. “No, surely not?” returned the other. But he became less confident, on looking, and directed the bearers to “bring him to the nearest doctor’s shop.”
Thither he was brought; the window becoming from within, a wall of faces, deformed into all kinds of shapes through the agency of globular red bottles, green bottles, blue bottles, and other coloured bottles. A ghastly light shining upon him that he didn’t need, the beast so furious but a few minutes gone, was quiet enough now, with a strange mysterious writing on his face, reflected from one of the great bottles, as if Death had marked him: “Mine.”
The medical testimony was more precise and more to the purpose than it sometimes is in a Court of Justice. “You had better send for something to cover it. All’s over.”
Therefore, the police sent for something to cover it, and it was covered and borne through the streets, the people falling away. After it,