Chapter 37 - Page 2

and
sold for a trifle.

I found them; and accosting one, I asked if she knew of the persons I
had just left. She replied, that she did not; nor did she want to. I
then asked another, a miserable, toothless old woman, with a tattered
strip of coarse baling stuff round her body. Looking at me for an
instant, she resumed her raking in the rubbish, and said that she knew
who it was that I spoke of; but that she had no time to attend to
beggars and their brats. Accosting still another, who seemed to know my
errand, I asked if there was no place to which the woman could be taken.
"Yes," she replied, "to the church-yard." I said she was alive, and not
dead.

"Then she'll never die," was the rejoinder. "She's been down there these
three days, with nothing to eat;--that I know myself."

"She desarves it," said an old hag, who was just placing on her crooked
shoulders her bag of pickings, and who was turning to totter off, "that
Betsy Jennings desarves it--was she ever married? tell me that."

Leaving Launcelott's-Hey, I turned into a more frequented street; and
soon meeting a policeman, told him of the condition of the woman and the
girls.

"It's none of my business, Jack," said he. "I don't belong to that
street."

"Who does then?"

"I don't know. But what business is it of yours? Are you not a Yankee?"

"Yes," said I, "but come, I will help you remove that woman, if you say
so."

"There, now, Jack, go on board your ship and stick to it; and leave
these matters to the town."

I accosted two more policemen, but with no better success; they would
not even go with me to the place. The truth was, it was out of the way,
in a silent, secluded spot; and the misery of the three outcasts, hiding
away in the ground, did not obtrude upon any one.

Returning to them, I again stamped to attract their attention; but this
time, none of the three looked up, or even stirred. While I yet stood
irresolute, a voice called to me from a high, iron-shuttered window in a
loft over the way; and asked what I was about. I beckoned to the man, a
sort of porter, to come down, which he did; when I pointed down into the
vault.

"Well," said he, "what of it?"

"Can't we get them out?" said I, "haven't you some place in your
warehouse where you can put them? have you nothing for them to eat?"

"You're crazy, boy," said he; "do you suppose, that Parkins and Wood
want their warehouse turned into a hospital?"

I then went to my boarding-house, and told Handsome Mary of what I had