This page has been validated.
18
THE FORLORN HOPE
legitimate refuge—the Parish; and Mary would have imagined she heaped the bitterest wrong upon Lucy, if she had consulted "the parish doctor;" thus, her national prejudice shut her out from the only relief, trifling as it might have been, which she could obtain for the poor girl she so tenderly cherished.
Mary had such an aversion to the "Poor-house" that she would go round the public road rather than pass the rambling building close to the burying-ground, where the Chelsea poor find shelter; and was never beguiled but once to look through the gate at the Workhouse in the Fulham Road. It was formerly the residence of the second Lord Shaftesbury;
where Locke, and other great men of his time, congregated. "I stopped to look in at it, Miss Lucy, dear," she said, "through a fine ould ancient gate—and the flower-pots, up the steps, were filled with beautiful flowers—and an old residenter—a blind woman, that a slip of a girl held by the hand, was standing on the top; and there came out a fine-dressed lady, for all the world like a full-blown trumpet; and the dark woman courtesied, and asked lave to 'come out'—think of one craythur asking another for lave to breathe the air of heaven outside an ould gate!—and, I suppose she got it, for the lady in red threw some words at her, and she gave another courtesy, and came down the steps—her and the girleen. I had seen enough, and turned away, for my heart was full. I have never lived in slavery, and, plase God, I won't die in it, Miss Lucy—and none I love shall ever be behoulden to a parish." This was reasoning—more of the heart than of the head. And yet, who can say that poor Mary was very wrong? True, that a roof shelters, and food keeps in existence the English pauper; but all the feelings that are cherished and honoured without the workhouse walls, are insulted and uprooted within; the holy law of wedded life—the command, what God hath joined let not man separate—is there outraged; fifty years have that aged man and woman paid the tithe and the tax; half a century have they laboured honestly; the grave has closed over their children and their early