‘Sit down, Mike,’ said the mayor gently.

‘Goo!  What d’ye take me for?’ said Mike, lifting his hands a little.

‘Sit down, I tell you.’

‘Huh—­yes, an’ let you cop me over the head?  You just try it—­that’s all; you just come an’ try it?’

‘I—­er—­have no intention of trying it,’ said Mr Pinsent.  ’It certainly would not become me to administer—­to inflict—­corporal punishment on a youth of your—­er—­inches.  What grieves me—­what pains me more than I can say, is to find a boy of your—­er-size and er—­development—­by which I mean mental development, sense of responsibility—­er—­mixed up in this disgraceful affair.  I had supposed it to be a prank, merely—­a piece of childish mischief—­and that the perpetrators were quite small boys.’  (Here—­not a doubt of it—­Mr Pinsent was telling the truth.)

‘Why,’ he went on, with the air of one making a pleasant little discovery, ’I shouldn’t be surprised to find you almost as tall as myself!  Yes.  I declare I believe you are quite as tall!  No’-he put up a hand as Mike, apparently suspecting a ruse, backed in a posture of defence—­’we will not take our measures to-day.  I have something more serious to think about.  For you will have noticed that while I suspected this robbery to be the work of small thoughtless boys, I treated it lightly; but now that I find a great strapping fellow like you mixed up in the affair, it becomes my business to talk to you very seriously indeed.’

And he did.  He sat down facing Mike Halloran across the table, and read him a lecture that should have made any boy of Mike’s size thoroughly ashamed of himself; and might have gone on admonishing for an hour had not Mrs Salt knocked again at the door.

‘If you please,’ announced Mrs Salt, ’here’s the Widow Barnicutt from the Quay to see you, along with her red-headed ‘Dolphus.’

‘Which,’ said the Widow Barnicutt, panting in at her heels and bobbing a curtsey, ‘it’s sorry I am to be disturbin’ your Worship, and I wouldn’t do it if his poor father was alive and could give ’em the strap for his good.  But the child bein’ that out of hand that all my threats do seem but to harden him, and five shillin’ a week’s wage to an unprovided woman; and I hope your Worship will excuse the noise I make with my breathin’, which is the assma, and brought on by fightin’ my way through the other women.’

Mr Pinsent gasped, and put up a hand to his brow.

‘The other women?’ he echoed.  ‘What other women?’

’The passage is full of ’em,’ said Mrs Salt, much as though she were reporting that the house was on fire.

‘Ay,’ said the widow, ’but my ’Dolphus is the guilty one—­I got his word for it.’

‘There’s Maria Bunny,’ persisted Mrs Salt, beginning to tick off the list on her fingers, ’Maria Bunny with her Wesley John, and Mary Polly Polwarne with her Nine Days’ Wonder, and Amelia Trownce with the twins, and Deb Hicks with the child she christened Nonesuch, thinkin’ ’twas out of the Bible; and William Spargo’s second wife Maria with her step-child, and Catherine Nance with her splay-footed boy that I can never remember the name of—­’