CHAPTER VIII.
MY OWN ACQUAINTANCE.
It was after this that my own acquaintance with Falconer commenced.
I had just come out of one of the theatres in the neighbourhood of
the Strand, unable to endure any longer the dreary combination of
false magnanimity and real meanness, imported from Paris in the
shape of a melodrama, for the delectation of the London public. I
had turned northwards, and was walking up one of the streets near
Covent Garden, when my attention was attracted to a woman who came
out of a gin-shop, carrying a baby. She went to the kennel, and
bent her head over, ill with the poisonous stuff she had been
drinking. And while the woman stood in this degrading posture, the
poor, white, wasted baby was looking over her shoulder with the
smile of a seraph, perfectly unconscious of the hell around her.
'Children will see things as God sees them,' murmured a voice beside
me.
I turned and saw a tall man with whose form I had already become a
little familiar, although I knew nothing of him, standing almost at
my elbow, with his eyes fixed on the woman and the child, and a
strange smile of tenderness about his mouth, as if he were blessing
the little creature in his heart.
He too saw the wonder of the show, typical of so much in the world,
indeed of the world itself--the seemingly vile upholding and
ministering to the life of the pure, the gracious, the fearless.
Aware from his tone more than from his pronunciation that he was a
fellow-countryman, I ventured to speak to him, and in a
home-dialect.
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