a manner as to set Tony full of longings after the country, with its
cornfields, and meadows, and hedge-rows, which he had never seen. He
remembered his Bible, too, and could repeat chapter after chapter
describing his Master's life, as they sat together in the perpetual
twilight of their room; for now that it was summer-time it did not seem
right to keep the gas burning.

Tony's crossing had failed him altogether, for in dry weather nobody
wanted it; but in this extremity Mr. Ross came to his aid, and procured
him a place as errand-boy, where he was wanted from eight o'clock in the
morning till seven at night; so that he could still open old Oliver's
shop, and fetch him his right papers before he went out, and put the
shutters up when he came back. To become an errand-boy was a good step
forwards, and Tony was more than content. He never ran about bare-headed
and barefooted now as he had done twelve months before; and he had made
such good progress in reading and writing that he could already make out
the directions upon the parcels he had to deliver, after they had been
once read over to him. He did not object to the dry weather and clean
streets as he had done when his living depended upon his crossing; on the
contrary, he enjoyed the sunshine, and the crowds of gaily-dressed
people, for he could hold up his head amongst them, and no longer went
prowling about in the gutters searching after bits of orange-peel. He
kicked them into the gutters instead, mindful of that accident which had
befallen him, but which turned out so full of good for him.

[Illustration: DOLLY'S MONTHLY REGISTER.]

But, if there had been any eye to see it, a very slow, and very sad
change was creeping over Dolly; so slowly indeed, that perhaps none but
her mother's eye could have seen it at first. On the first of every
month, which old Oliver knew by the magazines coming in, he marked how
much his little love had grown by placing her against the side-post of
the door, and making a thick pencil line where her curly head reached to.
He looked at this record often, smiling at the rate his little woman was
growing taller; but it was really no wonder that his dim eyes, loving as
they were, never saw how the rosy colour was dying away out of her
cheeks, as gradually as the red glow fades away in the west after the sun
has set, nor how the light grew fainter and fainter in her blue eyes,
until they looked at him very heavily from under her drooping e