Among such garniture, in one front parlour in the dead of the night, four women were sitting by a fire. One of them had a male child in her arms. On a stool among them was a swarthy youth with a guitar, who had evidently stopped playing when our footsteps were heard. ‘Well! how do _you_ do?’ says Mr. Superintendent, looking about him. ‘Pretty well, sir, and hope you gentlemen are going to treat us ladies, now you have come to see us.’ ‘Order there!’ says Sharpeye. ‘None of that!’ says Quickear. Trampfoot, outside, is heard to confide to himself, ‘Meggisson’s lot this is. And a bad ’un!’ ‘Well!’ says Mr. Superintendent, laying his hand on the shoulder of the swarthy youth, ‘and who’s this?’ ‘Antonio, sir.’ ‘And what does _he_ do here?’ ‘Come to give us a bit of music. No harm in that, I suppose?’ ‘A young foreign sailor?’ ‘Yes. He’s a Spaniard. You’re a Spaniard, ain’t you, Antonio?’ ‘Me Spanish.’ ‘And he don’t know a word you say, not he; not if you was to talk to him till doomsday.’ (Triumphantly, as if it redounded to the credit of the house.) ‘Will he play something?’ ‘Oh, yes, if you like. Play something, Antonio. _You_ ain’t ashamed to play something; are you?’ The cracked guitar raises the feeblest ghost of a tune, and three of the women keep time to it with their heads, and the fourth with the child. If Antonio has brought any money in with him, I am afraid he will never take it out, and it even strikes me that his jacket and guitar may be in a bad way. But, the look of the young man and the tinkling of the instrument so change the place in a moment to a leaf out of Don Quixote, that I wonder where his mule is stabled, until he leaves off. I am bound to acknowledge (as it tends rather to my uncommercial confusion), that I occasioned a difficulty in this establishment, by having taken the child in my arms. For, on my offering to restore it to a ferocious joker not unstimulated by rum, who claimed to be its mother, that unnatural parent put her hands behind her, and declined to accept it; backing into the fireplace, and very shrilly declaring, regardless of remonstrance from her friends, that she knowed it to be Law, that whoever took a child from its mother of his own will, was bound to stick to it. The uncommercial sense of being in a rather ridiculous position with the poor little child beginning to be frightened, was relieved by my worthy friend and fellow-constable, Trampfoot; who, laying hands on the article as if it were a Bottle, passed it on to the nearest woman, and bade her ‘take hold of that.’ As we came out the Bottle was passed to the ferocious joker, and they all sat down as before, including Antonio and the guitar. It was clear that there was no such thing as a nightcap to this baby’s head, and that even he never went to bed, but was always kept up—and would grow up, kept up—waiting for Jack.