The cobbler, a brave old hero himself, though unannaled and unsung, went privily to the head office of the big fruit brokers for whom Dan Cullen had worked as a casual laborer for thirty years.Their system was such that the work was almost entirely done by casual hands.The cobbler told them the man's desperate plight, old, broken, dying, without help or money, reminded them that he had worked for them thirty years, and asked them to do something for him.
'Oh,' said the manager, remembering Dan Cullen without having to refer to the books, 'you see, we make it a rule never to help casuals, and we can do nothing.'
Nor did they do anything, not even sign a letter asking for Dan Cullen's admission to a hospital.And it is not so easy to get into a hospital in London Town.At Hampstead, if he passed the doctors, at least four months would elapse before he could get in, there were so many on the books ahead of him.The cobbler finally got him into the Whitechapel Infirmary, where he visited him frequently.Here he found that Dan Cullen had succumbed to the prevalent feeling, that, being hopeless, they were hurrying him out of the way.A fair and logical conclusion, one must agree, for an old and broken man to arrive at, who has been resolutely 'disciplined' and 'drilled' for ten years.When they sweated him for Bright's disease to remove the fat from the kidneys, Dan Cullen contended that the sweating was hastening his death; while Bright's disease, being a wasting away of the kidneys, there was therefore no fat to remove and the doctor's excuse was a palpable lie.Whereupon the doctor became wroth, and did not come near him for nine days.