He told her he was very bad; but she went away without a word,
and he saw nothing more of her. Towards night he became worse and
finally delirious.
CHAPTER XIV--THE SCHOOL OF ADVERSITY THE SIXTH FORM THEREOF
When Zachariah came to himself he was in a large, long, whitewashed
room, with twenty beds or more in it. A woman in a greyish check
dress was standing near him.
"Where am I?" he said.
"Where are yer?" she said; "why, in the workus infirmary, to be sure,
with me a-looking after yer. Where would yer be?"
Zachariah relapsed and was still. The next time he opened his eyes
the woman had left him. It was true he was in the workhouse, and a
workhouse then was not what it is now. Who can possibly describe
what it was? Who can possibly convey to anybody who has not known
what it was by actual imprisonment in it any adequate sense of its
gloom; of the utter, callous, brutal indifference of the so-called
nurses; of the neglect of the poor patients by those who were paid to
attend to them; of the absence of even common decency; of the
desperate persistent attempts made by everybody concerned to impress
upon the wretched mortals who were brought there that they were
chargeable to the parish and put there for form's sake, prior to
being shovelled into a hole in the adjoining churchyard? The
infirmary nurses were taken from the other side of the building--
sometimes for very strange reasons.
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