Oh! strange new world
That has such people in it!—Shakespeare.
The beldam was the first to awake. She looked at the child and asked if he had slept well, and if he had had anything to eat, and having received satisfactory answers, she set about preparing her own breakfast.
It was her daily custom, in returning home at evening to pick up and put into her wallet almost any sort of trash she might find about the streets; not only rags, but paper, straw, dry leaves, chips, sticks, and so forth.
Of these she now made just fire enough in the rusty grate to boil her kettle and make her tea.
And then she took from a small bundle a store of crusts and bones and broken victuals, all of which she arranged on the end of the rickety table; and so she made her morning meal.
“You may have what’s left. And mind you take care of that child while I’m gone.”
And with these orders, given of course to Meg, she put on her smashed bonnet and took her bundle of matches and went off to her usual haunts. And she did this, notwithstanding that she had received ten pounds the night before. Such with her was the force of habit, or of rapacity.
After she had gone Meg made a meal of the fragments she had left, and washed it down with milk, now turned sour, that had been provided for Lenny on the preceding evening.
Then she cleared the table, and straightened the bed, and tidied the miserable room as well as she could.