"Thick!" cried the plump woman; "it's 'orrible! And what am I to do? He's been here three times now, six days and a week and a part of a week, and I pray to God night and day he may never come again. Praying! Back he's come sure as fate. He takes my money and he takes my things. He won't let no man stay here to protect me or do the boats or work the ferry. The ferry's getting a scandal. They stand and shout and scream and use language.... If I complain they'll say I'm helpless to manage here, they'll take away my license, out I shall go--and it's all the living I can get--and he knows it, and he plays on it, and he don't care. And here I am. I'd send the child away, but I got nowhere to send the child. I buys him off when it comes to that, and back he comes, worse than ever, prowling round and doing evil. And not a soul to help me. Not a soul! I just hoped there might be a day or so. Before he comes back again. I was just hoping--I'm the sort that hopes." Mr. Polly was reflecting on the flaws and drawbacks that seem to be inseparable from all the more agreeable things in life. "Biggish sort of man, I expect?" asked Mr. Polly, trying to get the situation in all its bearings. But the plump woman did not heed him. She was going on with her fire-making, and retailing in disconnected fragments the fearfulness of Uncle Jim. "There was always something a bit wrong with him," she said, "but nothing you mightn't have hoped for, not till they took him and carried him off and reformed him.... "He was cruel to the hens and chickings, it's true, and stuck a knife into another boy, but then I've seen him that nice to a cat, nobody could have been kinder. I'm sure he didn't do no 'arm to that cat whatever anyone tries to make out of it. I'd never listen to that.... It was that reformatory ruined him. They put him along of a lot of London boys full of ideas of wickedness, and because he didn't mind pain--and he don't, I will admit, try as I would--they made him think himself a hero. Them boys laughed at the teachers they set over them, laughed and mocked at them--and I don't suppose they was the best teachers in the world; I don't suppose, and I don't suppose anyone sensible does suppose that everyone who goes to be a teacher or a chapl'in or a warder in a Reformatory Home goes and changes right away into an Angel of Grace from Heaven--and Oh, Lord! where was I?" "What did they send him to the Reformatory for?" "Playing truant and stealing. He stole right enough--stole the money from an old woman, and what was I to do when it came to the trial but say what I knew. And him like a viper a-looking at me--more like a viper than a human boy. He leans on the bar and looks at me. 'All right, Aunt Flo,' he says, just that and nothing more. Time after time, I've dreamt of it, and now he's come. 'They've Reformed me,' he says, 'and made me a devil, and devil I mean to be to you. So out with it,' he says." "What did you give him last time?" asked Mr. Polly.