Lemuel broke out involuntarily in all the severity that was native to him. “You ought to be ashamed of yourselves.”
This convulsed the bold things with laughter. When they could get their breath, one of them said, “Pshaw! I know what he's up for: preaching on the Common. Say, young feller! don't you want to hold a prayer-meetin' here?”
They burst into another shriek of laughter, so wild and shrill that the driver rapped on the roof, and called down, “Dry up in there!”
“Oh, you mind your horses, and we'll look after the passengers. Go and set on his knee, Jen, and cheer him up a little.”
Lemuel sat in a quiver of abhorrence. The girl appealed to remained giggling beside her companion.
“I—I pity ye!” said Lemuel.
The Irishwoman had not stopped bewailing herself, and imploring right and left an easy doom. She now addressed herself wholly to Lemuel, whose personal dignity seemed to clothe him with authority in her eyes. She told him about her children, left alone with no one to look after them; the two little girls, the boy only three years old. When the van stopped at a station to take in more passengers, she tried to get out—to tell the gentlemen at the office about it, she said.
After several of these halts they stopped at the basement of a large stone building, that had a wide flight of steps in front, and columns, like the church at Willoughby Pastures, only the church steps were wood, and the columns painted pine. Here more officers took charge of them, and put them in a room where there were already twenty-five or thirty other prisoners, the harvest of the night before; and presently another van-load was brought in.
There were many women among them, but here there was no laughing or joking as there had been in the van. Scarcely any one spoke, except the Irishwoman, who crept up to an officer at the door from time to time, and begged him to tell the judge to let her have it easy this time. Lemuel could not help seeing that she and most of the others were familiar with the place. Those two saucy jades who had mocked him were silent, and had lost their bold looks.
After waiting what seemed a long time, the door was opened, and they were driven up a flight of stairs into a railed enclosure at the corner of a large room, where they remained huddled together, while a man at a long desk rattled over something that ended with “God bless the commonwealth of Massachusetts.” On a platform behind the speaker sat a grey-haired man in spectacles, and Lemuel knew that he was in the court-room, and that this must be the judge. He could not see much of the room over the top of the railing, but there was a buzz of voices and a stir of feet beyond, that made him think the place was full. But full or empty, it was the same to him; his shame could not be greater or less. He waited apathetically while the clerk read off the charges against the vastly greater number of his fellow-prisoners arrested for drunkenness. When these were disposed of, he read from the back of a paper, which he took from a fresh pile, “Bridget Gallagher, complained of for habitual drunkenness. Guilty or not guilty?”