strong tea, ginger, sugar-cane, and dried fish. She had not been wisely approached in the first place, and she was in her sulkiest and most combative humor; in fact, when too urgently pressed for information as to her age, ancestry, and abiding-place, she told the worthy police-officer to go to a locality for which he felt utterly unsuited, after a life spent in the exaltation of virtue and the suppression of vice. (The vocabulary of the twins was somewhat poverty-stricken in respect to the polite phrases of society, but in profanity it would have been rich for a parrot or a pirate.) The waifs were presently given to the care of the police matron, and her advice, sought later, was to the effect that the children had better be fed and put to bed, and as little trouble expended upon them as was consistent with a Christian city government.
"It is possible their parents may call for them in the morning," she said acidly, "but I think it is more than likely that they have been deserted. I know if they belonged to me they’d be lost for ever before I tried to find them!" and she rubbed a black-and-blue spot on her person, which, if exposed, would have betrayed the shape, size, and general ground-plan of Pacific’s boot.
