haste. True, it was not nice to feel the dead man when she put out foot or hand; but then she need not put out foot or hand.

And Poppie

It was a rare

was not used to feeling warm. sensation, and she found it delightful.

Every

now and then she peeped from under the mortcloth, for the Duke was supposed to be lying in state, to see whether Thomas and Lucy were coming. But at length, what with the mental and physical effects of warmth and comfort combined, she fell fast asleep, and dreamed she was in a place she had been in once before, though she had forgotten all about it. From the indefinite account she gave of it, I can only conjecture that it was the embodiment of the vaguest memory of a motherly bosom; that it was her own mother's bosom she recalled even thus faintly, I much doubt. But from this undefined bliss she was suddenly aroused by a rough hand and a rough voice loaded with a curse. Poppie was used to curses, and did not mind them a bit -somehow they never hurt her—but she was a little frightened at the face of indignant surprise

VOL. I.

L

and wrath which she saw bending over her when she awoke. It was that of one of the attendants. He had a policeman beside him, for whom he had sent before he awoke the child, allowing her thus a few moments of unconscious blessedness with the future hanging heavy in the near distance. But the Duke had slept none the less soundly that she was by his side, and had lost none of the warmth that she had gained.

It was well for Ruth that there were no police when she slept in Boaz's barn; still better that some of the clergymen who serve God by reading her story on the Sunday, were not magistrates before whom the police carried her. With a tight grasp on her arm, Poppie was walked away in a manner uncomfortable at least to one who was accustomed to trot along at her own sweet will, and a sweet will it was, that for happiness was content to follow and keep within sight of some one that drew her, without longing for even a word of grace-to what she had learned to call the jug, namely, the police-prison. But my reader must not spend too much of his stock of sympathy

upon Poppie; for she did not mind it much. To be sure in such weather the jug was very cold, but she had the memories of the past to comfort her, the near past, spent in the society of the dead Duke, warm and consoling. When she fell asleep on the hard floor of the lock-up, she dreamed that she was dead and buried, and trying to be warm and comfortable as she ought to be in her grave, only somehow or another she could not get things to come right; the wind would blow through the chinks of her pauper's coffin and she wished she had been a duke or a great person generally to be so grandly buried as they were in the cemetery in Baker-street. But Poppie was far less to be pitied for the time, cold as she was, than Mary Boxall, lying half asleep and half awake and all dreaming in that comfortable room, with a blazing fire, and her own mother sitting beside it. True, likewise, Poppie heard a good many bad words and horrid speeches in the jug, but she did not heed them much. Indeed, they did not even distress her, she was so used to them; nor, upon occasion,

was her own language the very pink of propriety. How could it be? The vocabulary in use in the houses she knew had ten vulgar words in it to one that Mattie for instance would hear. But whether Poppie, when speaking the worst language that ever crossed her lips, was lower, morally and spiritually considered, than the young lord in the nursery, who, speaking with articulation clearcut as his features, and in language every word of which is to be found in Johnson, refuses his brother a share of his tart and gobbles it up himself, there is to me, knowing that if Poppie could swear she could share, no question whatever. God looks after his children in the cellars as well as in the nurseries of London.

Of course she was liberated in the morning, for the police magistrates of London are not so cruel as some of those country clergymen who, not content with preaching about the justice of God from the pulpit, must seat themselves on the magistrate's bench to dispense the injustice of men. If she had been brought before some of them for sleeping under a haystack, and

having no money in her pocket, as if the nightsky besides being a cold tester to lie under were something wicked as well, she would have been sent to prison; for instead of believing in the blessedness of the poor, they are of Miss Kilmansegg's opinion, "that people with nought are naughty." The poor little thing was only reprimanded for being where she had no business to be, and sent away. But it was no wonder if

after this adventure she should know Thomas again when she saw him; nay, that she should sometimes trot after him for the length of a street or so. But he never noticed her.