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. The prisoner goes out of the dock following the warder, and disappears through a small side door. The mother has gone away without waiting, and I hurry to follow her. But she walks so fast that I can hardly keep pace with her. She passes again on the bridge, walks along the quay, plunges in a by-street, goes up towards the south-western quarters of Dublin, called the _liberties_ of the town. Suddenly I lose sight of her at the corner of a narrow lane, and after winding round and round I am obliged to renounce coming up with her. There is a way of course to come to the relief of those poor creatures, by sending one’s subscription to the judge according to the British fashion. But I wanted to see them at home in their den, wallowing in their squalor, to see whether men or destiny bear the responsibility for such dark distress. Alas! examples are not wanting, and I have only to cross the first door that opens before me. Along these lanes yawn dark alleys from which hundreds of half-naked children are swarming out. All ages are represented; they are in the most fantastical and unexpected attire. One has got on breeches fastened under the shoulders by a piece of cord in lieu of braces; the same is full of holes large enough for his head to go through. Another has no shirt, and trails in the gutter the jagged skirt of a coat slashed like a doublet, and with only one sleeve left. They are all of them so extravagantly slovenly that it seems to be a competition for rags.