Two or three policemen came up and examined her.
“Drank,” said one of them impressively.
“No, she ain’t,” said the child; “I asked her that and she said no, she worn’t a bit drank; she had an orful pain and wor werry giddy, and werry trembling in the limbs, but it won’t drink, I tell yer. She spoke real sensible. I know ’em when they drinks, and thet worn’t what ailed her. She wanted me to take her to some Buildings or t’other, and she promised me thruppence. Do you think as I might take it out of her pocket?”
“No, no; get out of this, you little varmint,” said the police. They examined Poll more critically, and finally decided to take her on a shutter to the Bearcat hospital: this happened to be Saint Bartholomew’s.
Chapter Fourteen.
Notwithstanding the uses of adversity, it is astonishing how well prosperity agrees with some people. It has much the same sort of effect on them that the sun has on fruit and flowers. All the graces within them which have been invisible while the rough winds of adversity blew, now blossom, and show sweet bits of colour, and little tender, gracious perfumes, which no one would have supposed consistent with such hard, crabbed, in short disagreeable products of nature.
Silas Lynn had all through his life, up to the present day, been visited by the harsh winds of adversity.
It is true they had not come to him in the form of poverty. He was too prudent, too hard-working for poverty to have anything to do with him. But a man can suffer adversity without being poor, and Silas’s life from his cradle up to the present had been a hard one.