Chapter 4 - Page 2

and After lived the large family of little Pikes, who quarrelled
at night for the middle place in the bed, and then chips of ceiling fell
into the room below, tenant Jim Ricketts and parents, lodger the young
woman we have been trying all these doors for. Her the police snapped up
on a charge; that made Tommy want to hide himself--child-desertion.

Shovel was the person best worth listening to on the subject (observe
him, the centre of half a dozen boys), and at first he was for the
defence, being a great stickler for the rights of mothers. But when the
case against the girl leaked out, she need not look to him for help. The
police had found the child in a basket down an area, and being knowing
ones they pinched it to make it cry, and then they pretended to go away.
Soon the mother, who was watching hard by to see if it fell into kind
hands, stole to her baby to comfort it, "and just as she were a kissing
on it and blubbering, the perlice copped her."

"The slut!" said disgusted Shovel, "what did she hang about for?" and in
answer to a trembling question from Tommy he replied, decisively, "Six
months hard."

"Next case" was probably called immediately, but Tommy vanished, as if
he had been sentenced and removed to the cells.

Never again, unless he wanted six months hard, must he go near Reddy's
home, and so he now frequently accompanied his mother to the place where
she worked. The little room had a funny fireplace called a stove, on
which his mother made tea and the girls roasted chestnuts, and it had no
other ordinary furniture except a long form. But the walls were
mysterious. Three of them were covered with long white cloths, which
went to the side when you tugged them, and then you could see on rails
dozens of garments that looked like nightgowns. Beneath the form were
scores of little shoes, most of them white or brown. In this house
Tommy's mother spent eight hours daily, but not all of them in this
room. When she arrived the first thing she did was to put Elspeth on the
floor, because you cannot fall off a floor; then she went upstairs with
a bucket and a broom to a large bare room, where she stayed so long that
Tommy nearly forgot what she was like.

While his mother was upstairs Tommy would give Elspeth two or three
shoes to eat to keep her quiet, and then he played with the others,
pretending to be able to count them, arranging them in designs, shooting
them, swimming among them, saying "bow-wow" at them and then turning
sharply to see who had said it. Soon Elspeth dropped her shoes and gazed
in admiration at him, but more often than not she laughed in the wrong
place, and then he said ironically: "Oh, in course I can't