An Outcast; Or, Virtue and FaithAdams, F. Colburn (Francis Colburn)
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An Outcast; Or, Virtue and Faith
Adams, F. Colburn (Francis Colburn)
Conduct of life -- Fiction; United States -- Social life and customs -- 19th century -- Fiction; Vice -- Fiction
"Well, English was hard to do for some time, and through necessity,
which he said a deal about, we were driven out of every place we had
sought shelter in. And English did something they sent him up for a
twelve-month for, and I was left to get on as I could. I was took in by
'Hard-Fisted Sall,' who always wore a knuckle-duster, and used to knock
everybody down she met, and threatened a dozen times to whip Mr.
Fitzgerald, the detective, and used to rob every one she took in tow,
and said if she could only knock down and rob the whole pumpkin-headed
corporation she should die easy, for then she would know she had done a
good thing for the public, whose money they were squandering without
once thinking how the condition of such wretches as herself could be
bettered.
"English died before he had been up two months. And death reconciled the
little difficulty between him and the McCartys; and old Mrs. McCarty's
liking for him came back, and she went crying to the Bellevue and begged
them, saying she was his mother, to let her take his body away and bury
it. They let her have it, and she brought it away to the rookery, in a
red coffin, and got a clean sheet of the Blazers, and hung it up beside
the coffin, and set four candles on a table, and a little cross between
them, and then borrowed a Bible with a cross on it, and laid it upon the
coffin. Then they sent for me. I cried and kissed poor English, for poor
English was the only father I knew, and he was good to me. I never shall
forget what I saw in that little room that night. I found a dozen
friends and the McCartys there, forming a half-circle of curious and
demoniacal faces, peering over the body of English, whose face, I
thought, formed the only repose in the picture. There were two small
pictures--one of the Saviour, and the other of Kossuth--hung at the head
and feet of the corpse; and the light shed a lurid paleness over the
living and the dead. And detective Fitzgerald and another gentleman
looked in.
"'Who's here to-night?' says Fitzgerald, in a friendly sort of way.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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