every doorway and
passage swarms with children. But Orlando had the proud distinction of
having spent three months of his short life in hospital, "summat wrong
with his inside" having resulted from the kick of a drunken father who
objected to the sight or sound of the children he had brought into the
world, these at present numbering but seven, four having been mercifully
removed from further dispensation of strap and fist and heavy boot.

Such sympathy as the over-worked drudges who constituted the wives of
the neighborhood had to spare, had concentrated on Orlando, whose
"inside" still continued wrong, and who, though almost three, had never
been able to bear his weight on his feet, but became livid at once, if
the experiment was tried,--a fact of perennial interest to the entire
alley.

Wemock's fury at this state of things was something indescribable. A
"casual" at the Docks, with the uncertainty of work which is the
destruction of the casual laborer, he regarded the children as simply a
species of investment, slow of making any return, but certain in the
end. Up to five, say, they must be fed and housed somehow, but from five
on a boy of any spirit ought to begin a career as mud-lark to graduate
from it in time into anything for which this foundation had fitted him.
The girls were less available, and he blessed his stars that there were
but three, and cursed them as he reflected that Polly was tied hand and
foot to Orlando, who persisted in living, and equally persisted in
clinging to Polly, who mothered him more thoroughly than any previous
Wemock had been.

Not that the actual mother had not some gleams of tenderness, at least
for the babies. But life weighed heavily against any demonstration. She
was simply a beast of burden, patient, and making small complaint, and
adding to the intermittent family income in any way she could,--charing,
tailoring, or sack-making when the machine was not in pawn, and standing
in deadly terror of Wemock's fist. The casual, like most of the lower
order of laborers, has small opinion of women as a class, and meets any
remonstrance from them as to his habits with an unvarying formula.

"I'm yer 'usban', ain't I?" is the reply to request or objection alike,
and "husband" by the casual is defined as "a man with a right to knock
his woman down when he likes." This simplifies responsibility, and,
being accepted with little or no question by the women, allows great
latitude of action