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- 7131
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T20:48:14.842Z
- extracted_by
- structure-extraction-lambda
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- 7060
- text
- CHAPTER XXXVII.
WHAT REDBURN SAW IN LAUNCELOTT’S-HEY
The dead-house reminds me of other sad things; for in the vicinity of
the docks are many very painful sights.
In going to our boarding-house, the sign of the Baltimore Clipper, I
generally passed through a narrow street called “Launcelott’s-Hey,”
lined with dingy, prison-like cotton warehouses. In this street, or
rather alley, you seldom see any one but a truck-man, or some solitary
old warehouse-keeper, haunting his smoky den like a ghost.
Once, passing through this place, I heard a feeble wail, which seemed
to come out of the earth. It was but a strip of crooked side-walk where
I stood; the dingy wall was on every side, converting the mid-day into
twilight; and not a soul was in sight. I started, and could almost have
run, when I heard that dismal sound. It seemed the low, hopeless,
endless wail of some one forever lost. At last I advanced to an opening
which communicated downward with deep tiers of cellars beneath a
crumbling old warehouse; and there, some fifteen feet below the walk,
crouching in nameless squalor, with her head bowed over, was the figure
of what had been a woman. Her blue arms folded to her livid bosom two
shrunken things like children, that leaned toward her, one on each
side. At first, I knew not whether they were alive or dead. They made
no sign; they did not move or stir; but from the vault came that
soul-sickening wail.
I made a noise with my foot, which, in the silence, echoed far and
near; but there was no response. Louder still; when one of the children
lifted its head, and cast upward a faint glance; then closed its eyes,
and lay motionless. The woman also, now gazed up, and perceived me; but
let fall her eye again. They were dumb and next to dead with want. How
they had crawled into that den, I could not tell; but there they had
crawled to die. At that moment I never thought of relieving them; for
death was so stamped in their glazed and unimploring eyes, that I
almost regarded them as already no more. I stood looking down on them,
while my whole soul swelled within me; and I asked myself, What right
had any body in the wide world to smile and be glad, when sights like
this were to be seen? It was enough to turn the heart to gall; and make
a man-hater of a Howard. For who were these ghosts that I saw? Were
they not human beings? A woman and two girls? With eyes, and lips, and
ears like any queen? with hearts which, though they did not bound with
blood, yet beat with a dull, dead ache that was their life.
At last, I walked on toward an open lot in the alley, hoping to meet
there some ragged old women, whom I had daily noticed groping amid foul
rubbish for little particles of dirty cotton, which they washed out and
sold for a trifle.
I found them; and accosting one, I asked if she knew of the persons I
had just left. She replied, that she did not; nor did she want to. I
then asked another, a miserable, toothless old woman, with a tattered
strip of coarse baling stuff round her body. Looking at me for an
instant, she resumed her raking in the rubbish, and said that she knew
who it was that I spoke of; but that she had no time to attend to
beggars and their brats. Accosting still another, who seemed to know my
errand, I asked if there was no place to which the woman could be
taken. “Yes,” she replied, “to the church-yard.” I said she was alive,
and not dead.
“Then she’ll never die,” was the rejoinder. “She’s been down there
these three days, with nothing to eat;—that I know myself.”
“She desarves it,” said an old hag, who was just placing on her crooked
shoulders her bag of pickings, and who was turning to totter off, “that
Betsy Jennings desarves it—was she ever married? tell me that.”
Leaving Launcelott’s-Hey, I turned into a more frequented street; and
soon meeting a policeman, told him of the condition of the woman and
the girls.
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- Chunk 1