'Where's your husband?' asked the officer. 'I haven't seen him lately. He'll have to be summoned, you know, as you can't get a certificate.'
The officer in question has good reason to ask affectionately after the husband. Last year the worthy gentleman got a month for playfully tossing the officer down a flight of stairs on to his head.
'Where's my husband? Ah!' says she, purple with passion, 'you want to summon him, do you? Well, then, you jolly well carn't. Gord's got him.'
'Dead?' asked the chairman.
'Yes—didn't I say so?'
'Then you will be summoned instead.'
The lady didn't retire—she had to be diplomatically crowded out, and the last sounds that reached the room as she receded along the corridor, under gentle pressure, were wishes that the chairman and all concerned might go where—at least, if her estimate of his whereabouts was correct—they would not have the pleasure of meeting her late lamented consort.
There are some rough customers to deal with in this district—so rough that it is a wonder the Act works so smoothly as it does. The fiercest and most reckless of the lawless classes have to be bearded in their dens by the devoted, ill-paid officers, who ferret out the children and insist upon their coming to school. Up to the topmost garret and down to the lowest cellar, in dens and hovels given over to thieves and wantons, I have accompanied a School Board officer on his rounds, and I frankly confess that I have passed a few bad quarters of an hour.
There are dozens of these places where the blow follows the word in a moment, where life is held of the least account, and where assaults are so common that the victims would as soon think of asking the police to notice their broken windows as to take cognizance of their broken heads.
There is a legend that in one of these cellars in the Mint—it fetches three shillings a week rent, by-the-bye—a man killed a woman and left her; and that nobody took any notice until the body got unpleasant, and then they threw it out into the street.