Number two is a boy fifteen or sixteen years old; he has a sweet intelligent countenance in spite of the indescribable rags that cover his body. Tears stand in his eyes and his lips are tremulous. Nothing in him of the habitual offender. The accusation that he is lying under seems to be: “Theft of a pork-chop in an open shop-window.” A single witness is called, a little maid five years old; so small that her head does not even reach the top of the witness-box. They bring her a footstool, on which she climbs to give her evidence.
She has seen the boy, she says, near the shop window, looking wistfully for a long time on the chops and finally pocketing one. However, her account is not very clear. All those people make her shy, and she does not speak out loud, so the clerk takes the trouble to read over to her the evidence she has just given. Does she know how to write? Can she sign her name? Yes. They place a pen in her fingers, and with infinite trouble, bending her small fair head, shooting out her lips, she writes on the legal parchment with her tiny trembling hand her name and surname: Maggie Flanagan.
“Well! prisoner, what have you to say?”
The unfortunate boy stammers that he was hungry, that there was not a penny in the house, and that he had no work.
“What is your father’s trade?”
“He is gone to Australia, your honour. Mother has been left with four children. I am the eldest. We had eaten nothing for two days.”
One feels he is speaking the truth. Every heart is moved.
Suddenly a shrill voice bursts out from the lower end of the room, wailing: “Oh, your honour, don’t send him to jail!...”
It is the woman I saw on the quay; the one that I followed to that Purgatory. The mother of the culprit very likely.
“I am obliged to remand you for a week in order to examine the circumstances of the case,” the judge says, in a manner that shows he is anxious to arrange the affair with kindness.