"No, thank you."
"Take milk, sir?"
"Heaven forbid! Milk, indeed! I tell you what, Mrs.—What's your name?—I tell you, if the Sultan had some of your great fellows—your grocers, and bakers, and dairymen, and brewers, egad!—out there, he'd have 'em on their ugly faces and bastinado their great feet into custard pudding! I've seen fellows—and devilish glad I was to see it, I can tell you—screaming like stuck pigs, and their eyes starting out of their heads, and their feet like bags of black currant jelly, ha, ha, ha!—for a good deal less. Now, you see, ma'am, I have high notions of honesty; and this tin case I'm going to give you will give me three small cups of coffee, as strong as I've described, six times over; do you understand?—six times three, eighteen; eighteen small cups of coffee; and don't let those pretty little foxes' cubs down stairs meddle with it. Tell 'em I know what I'm about, and they'd better not, ha, ha, ha! nor with anything that belongs to me, to the value of a single piastre."
Miss Sarah Rumble was a good deal dismayed by the jubilant severity of Mr. Dingwell's morals. She would have been glad had he been of a less sharp and cruel turn of pleasantry. Her heart was heavy, and she wished herself a happy deliverance, and had a vague alarm about the poor little children's falling under suspicion, and of all that might follow. But what could she do? Poverty is so powerless, and has so little time to weigh matters maturely, or to prepare for any change; its hands are always so full, and its stomach so empty, and its spirits so dull.
"I wish those d——d curtains were off the bed," and again they underwent the same disgusting process; "and the bed-clothes, egad! They purify nothing here. You know nothing about them either, of course? No—but they would not like to kill me. No;—that would not do. Knock their little game on the head, eh? I suppose it is all right. What's prevalent here now? What sort of—I mean what sort of death—fever, small-pox, or scarlatina—eh? Much sickness going?"
"Nothink a'most, sir; a little measles among the children."
"No objection to that; it heads them down a bit, and does not trouble us. But what among the grown people?"
"Nothink to signify in the court here, for three months a'most."
"And then, ma'am, what was it, pray? Give those to your boy" (they were his boots); "let him rub 'em up, ma'am, he's not a bit too young to begin; and, egad! he had better do 'em well, too;" and thrusting his feet into a great pair of slippers, he reverted to his question—"What sickness was then, ma'am, three months ago, here in this pleasant little prison-yard of a place—hey?"
"Fever, please, sir, at No. 4. Three took it, please: two of 'em went to hospital."