“And Mrs. McCarty agreed that it wouldn’t be amiss, and putting with
Sall’s shilling the money that was to get the candles, I was sent to
the ‘Bottomless Pit’ at the house of the ‘Nine Nations,’ where Mr.
Crown had a score with the old woman, and fetched away a quart of his
gin, which they said was getting the whole of them. The McCartys took a
drop, and the girls took a drop, and the neighbors took a drop, and
they all kept taking drops, and the drops got the better of them all.
One of the Miss McCartys got to having words with ‘Fighting Mary,’
about an old affair in which poor English was concerned, and the words
got to blows, when Mr. Flanegan at the Blazers stepped in to make
peace. But the whole house got into a fight, and the lights were put
out, the corpse knocked over, and the child (it was found dead in the
morning) suffocated with the weight of bodies felled in the melee. The
noise and cries of murder brought the police rushing in, and most of
them were dragged off to the Station; and the next day being Sunday, I
wandered homeless and friendless into Sheriff street. Poor English was
taken in charge by the officers. They kept him over Monday to see if
any one would come up and claim him. No one came for him; no one knew
more of him than that he went by the name of English; no one ever heard
him say where he came from-he never said a word about my mother, or
whether he had a relation in the world. He was carted off to Potter’s
Field and buried. That was the last of poor English.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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