The drink dulls every sense of shame, takes the sharp edge from sorrow, and leaves the drinker for awhile in a fools' paradise. Here is the home of the most notorious 'drunkardess'—if I may coin a work—in the neighbourhood. Mrs. O'Flannigan's room is easily entered, for it is on the street-level, and one step brings us into the presence of the lady herself. She is in bed, a dirty red flannel rag is wrapped about her shoulders, and her one arm is in a sling. She sits up in bed at the sight of visitors, and greets us in a gin and fog voice, slightly mellowed with the Irish brogue. Biddy has been charged at the police-courts seventy-five times with being drunk, and she is therefore a celebrated character. She is hardly sober now, though she has evidently had a shaking which would have sobered most people for a month. Her face is a mass of bruises and cuts, and every now and then a groan and a cry to certain Saints in her calendar tell of aches and pains in the limbs concealed under the dirty blanket that covers the bed.
'I'm a pretty sight now, ain't I, gintlemen dear?' she says, with a foolish laugh. 'Shure and I got blind drunk again last Saturday, and they run me in. The inspector let me out o' Sunday; God bless him for a rale gintleman! They carried me on a stretcher, bless yer hearts! and I kicked. Ha! ha! ha!'
The hag positively yelled with laughter as she thought of the scene she caused, and the trouble she gave the police.
Suddenly she looks round as if in search of something.
'Molly, ye young varmint, where are ye?' she shouts, and presently from under the bed, where the child lay crouching in fear, she drags a wretched little girl of seven or eight, with her face and head covered with sores, that make one shudder to look at them.
'There, Molly, ye young varmint, show yourself to their honours, will ye?'
The child begins to snivel. One of our number is the Board School officer of the district, and Molly has not been to school lately.
Mrs. O'Flannigan explains.
'Ye see, I can't use my limbs just yet, yer honour, and Molly—Lord love her!—she's just the only thing I got to look afther me. I might be burned in my blessed bed, yer honour, and not able to move.'
'You should give up getting drunk,' I ventured to suggest; 'then you wouldn't want a nurse.'