It was, I think, about half a year from this period, that, in returning late one evening from the neighbourhood of Russell Square, where my father, during a short visit he was compelled to make to town, had taken lodgings, I missed my way, and got entangled in the intricacies of the numerous narrow streets and alleys that lie between that quarter of London and the eastern end of Holborn. Intending to avail myself of some of the public conveyances homewards, I had attempted to shorten my passage to the great thoroughfares, and in doing so had thus gone astray. As it was past ten o'clock I was necessarily hurried, and yet the heat and heaviness of the night--it was July--prevented me freeing myself as rapidly as I should otherwise have done from the squalid and disagreeable avenues in which I had got entangled. I was just pausing to enquire my way of a slatternly-looking woman, who stood considerably in front of the door of a dirty-looking house in one of the dirtiest lanes I had yet explored, and who, with an apron thrown round her shoulders, to supply, it seemed to me, the absence of their appropriate garments, appeared, from the direction of her looks, to be awaiting some one's arrival, when a lad hastened up the opposite side of the alley, and breathlessly announced to her, that "the docther wouldn't come 'thout he first got his fee." "Holy Mary, mother of ----! Oh, wisha, what _am_ I to do!" exclaimed the woman in a strong Irish accent, with that elision of apostrophe into complaint peculiar to her country. "If she goes on this way till mornin', two men wouldn't hould her, let alone one _colleen_.[1] Run, Micky, to the 'seer, an' let him get her to the hospiddle, or my heart 'll be broke from her." "How dove I know where the 'seer lives at this hour o' the night?" expostulated the boy. "There's a wake in Tim Reilly's second floor--can't you go there, and they'll tell you--can't you?" The messenger disappeared, and I now, before putting the question for which I had stopped, asked the woman soothingly the cause of her perturbation. "Is it what's the matther, sir? Matther enough thin--a poor crethur of a woman lodgin' with me is took very bad with the fever. She wasn't to say so bad entirely till this evenin', when she begin to rave, and 'sist upon gettin' up; an' goin' on with terrible talk, that it would frighten the heart o' you to hear her." "How long," I said, "has she been ill?" "Wisha, sir, she was never well since the day she darkened my dure; but I think 'tis the heat o' the weather, an' her never stirrin' out, an' the weakness entirely, an' the impression on her heart, that is killin' her now." "And has she had no advice?" "Sorrow the 'vice--you'd think she'd go into fits when I mentioned a docther to her; and as to a priest or a ministher--my dear life, I might as well mention a blunderbush."