The stave chanted as an appetizer for the music-lover, she wiped the baby's nose with her ostentatiously white apron, and protested it to be the image of its father—blowed up in a Mind.
"You mean a mine, don't you?" P. C. Breagh was beginning, when the widow once more burst into song.
"Your wife and Fam'ly—Har they well?
You once did use them strynge!
Ho! Har you kinder to them now?
And wence this 'appy chynge?"
Reverting to prose, as P. C. Breagh lounged listlessly on, she demanded why, if he wasn't going to buy, he had stopped and given a respectable female Tongue.
"And not even fork out a copper, you blistered swindler! You blindin', blazin'——"
"Come now, Chanting Poll, what's all this here row about?"
The gruff, not unkindly voice of a policeman broke in upon the rusty widow's eloquence. P. C. Breagh, yielding to a sudden impulse, wheeled and swung back again.
"It's all right, constable, the lady was only having a bit of chaff with me!"
"I know her!" said P. C. 999, C. Division, removing a heavy but not brutal hand from the lady in question, "and the kind o' chaff she slings. Done Time for it, too, she 'as—before now!"
But he moved on, huge in his belted greatcoat, walking with the elephantine, clumping step begotten of boots with iron toe-caps, and iron-nailed soles at least two inches in thickness; and the dank widow cocked a knowing eye at his retreating back, and the other at her unexpected champion.