“Oh, the poor people! Oh, I am so awful sorry for them! I will ask Lady as soon as ever I get home to take them out of this horrid place, and give them lovely houses and sweet gardens in the beautiful country. Lady is awful rich, you know! And good! Oh, so good! You don’t know—oh, you don’t know how good she is!” said Owlet, with a philanthropist’s enthusiasm, forgetting her disgust in her ardor.
“And she’ll do it!” exclaimed the crone, with a harsh laugh of scornful incredulity—“Oh, she’ll do it! You may depend she’ll do it! I never seed her face to face, but I know as she’ll do every bit of it.”
“Yes, indeed, she will!” replied ignorant and confident Owlet; but she faltered as she spoke, and began to totter as she walked, for the stench of that pest place was penetrating, acrid, insistent. Owlet was again overpowered.
“Oh, please—go fast—hurry—hurry—out of this—or I shall—drop down—dead!” she gasped.
“Yes, my pretty little Fine Feathers; in one minute. You see, I live here, dearie—I——”
“You!” exclaimed the child, momentarily revived by her astonishment, and interrupting the hag’s speech; but the next instant wondering at herself for being the least surprised, for it seemed so natural that this creature should live in just this place.
“Yes,” said the ragpicker, “I bide here, dearie, and I just want to step inter my place one minnit to get my bunnit to put on my head, to dress myself up in it, you know, so as to be decent to go afore genteel folks like your lady is.”
She stopped before the very worst of all the rookeries in that alley, if that could be said of a house in a place where all houses were as bad as bad could be, and every one worse than the other—so to speak.
“Come along o’ me, Fine Feathers,” said the hag, leading the unfortunate child up a short flight of rickety, shaking steps, and through a front door that stood wide open, into a hall that was even a little more filthy than the alley from which they had entered.
The only light within it gleamed through partly open doors of tenement rooms on either side, with interiors indescribably squalid, and from which came odors insupportably nauseous. The tenement, in fact, seemed to be a colony of ragpickers.