The old fellow, who seemed to be a confirmed vagrant, from his slouchy look and greasy, unpatched clothes, had built a small fire of the refuse which abounded in the arches, and he was drying pieces of driftwood that had floated from the scaffolding on the new Blackfriar's Bridge down the river. He was warming his hands and slapping them, and the little girl of ten years was stooped over the fire, toasting an enormous potato on the end of a splinter of wood.
THE LOST GIRL.
"What are you herding here for, Prindle," said the detective to the old fellow, who looked up in a morose way and muttered something under his teeth which sounded like "D—n the bobbies."
"I'm a trying to get somethink to heat. Vy vill yer foller a cove everywheres as wants to get a mouthful to heat. I haint done nothink as should bring you here arter me. I'm not hon the pad now hany more."
"I don't want yer pertikler, I don't; but stop yer jaw and keep a civil tongue in yer head, will ye," said the sergeant. "Whose gal is that ere a toasting the taty with the skiver?"
"I'm blessed hif I knows whose gal it his. Ye don't suppose that I'm the man as makes the Post-hoffice Di-rek-te-ree. She haint mine, I know, cos I'm not a fool, nor never vos, to have any children. I must say she is werry 'andy at the taties when a feller wants to get some winks. But, I say, you got nothink aginst me from the Beak, 'ave you?"
"No, I have nothing against you just at this partickler moment, but I dunno how soon I'll have," said the sergeant. "But I have brought a gentleman here who wants to get some information about this 'ere precious family of yours, and how you contrive to live, and I want you to answer him civilly, or I may find something against you that would hurt your tender feelings, you know."
"He wants some hinformation habout me and my family, does he? That's a precious lark, that is. Why doesn't he stay in his bleeding bed and cover his nose hup in the sheets. I never asked 'im about his familee, as I knows on. Wot a werry pecoolier taste he has, to be sure. Maybe he's one of them rummaging Paper chaps as is halways a torkin about the rights and dooties of the vorkin' classes, and is a-ruinin' of the country's blessed prosperity?"
"Father, answer the man civilly, will ye. Yer halways a-making trouble for yourself by yer bad tongue, and it does other people harm as well as yourself. Tell him wot you have got to tell, and he'll go away."
This was said by the young girl, who now came forward and stood looking at the old man eagerly. She was robed in an old calico gown, rather tattered at the bottom, and quite besmirched with the washings of the Thames mud which had clung to the stone stairs of the bridge. The girl was well formed and tall, and her dress hung from a good figure. Her eyes were black and glittering, and her bold, coarse, handsome face was seared with the traces of evil passions, hardship, and reckless despair. The girl's face told her story before she had spoken. Childhood and girlhood reeking with the foulness of the gutters, and then the matured woman a castaway in the deadly miasma of the London slums.