"Oh, yes, sir," cried the prisoner with a burst of hysterical weeping as the bolts rattled from the dock and the kindly hand of the lady missionary clasped hers.
A distinguished Nonconformist once told me that our Anglican Prayer Book was a mass of ungranted petitions, which, after careful thought, I had to admit was true; but at least on the whole I think our prayers for this particular magistrate have been answered.
PUBLICANS AND HARLOTS
Verily I say unto you, that the publicans and harlots go into the kingdom of God before you.
It was 7.30 p.m., and in the Young Women's Ward of the workhouse the inmates were going to bed by the crimson light of the July sunset. Most of the women had babies, and now and then a fretful cry would interrupt a story that was being listened to with much interest and laughter and loud exclamations: "Oh, Daisy, you are a caution!"
Had a literary critic been present, he would have classed the tale as belonging to the French realistic school of Zola and Maupassant. The raconteuse, Daisy Crabtree, who might have sat as a model for Rossetti's Madonna of the Annunciation, was a slight, golden-haired girl, known to philanthropists as a "daughter of the State," and an object-lesson against such stepmothering. Picked up as an infant under a crab-tree by the police, and christened later in commemoration of the discovery, she had been brought up in a "barrack-school," and a "place" found for her at fifteen, from which she had "run" the following day; the streets had called to their daughter, and she had obeyed. Since then she had been "rescued" twenty-seven times—by Catholics, Anglicans, Wesleyans, Methodists, Baptists, and Salvationists—but not even the great influence of "Our Lady of the Snows" or "The Home of the Guardian Angels" could save this child of vice, and most Homes in London being closed against her, she perpetually sought shelter in the various workhouses of the Metropolis, always being "passed" back to the parish of the patronymic crab-tree where she was "chargeable." Here she resided at the expense of the rates, till some lady visitor, struck by her beauty and seeming innocence, provided her with an outfit and a situation.
"Shut up, Daisy!" said one girl, quiet and demure as her namesake Priscilla. "You're only fit for a pigsty."