f. Three
months' "play" in the streets got rid of this tender company,--shoeless,
half-naked, and uncombed,--whose age varied from two to five years. Some
were crushed, some were lost, some caught cold and fevers, crept back
to their garret or their cellars, were dosed with Godfrey's cordial, and
died in peace. The nameless one would not disappear. He always got out
of the way of the carts and horses, and never lost his own. They gave
him no food: he foraged for himself, and shared with the dogs the
garbage of the streets. But still he lived; stunted and pale, he defied
even the fatal fever which was the only habitant of his cellar that
never quitted it. And slumbering at night on a bed of mouldering straw,
his only protection against the plashy surface of his den, with a
dungheap at his head and a cesspool at his feet, he still clung to the
only roof which shielded him from the tempest.

At length when the nameless one had completed his fifth year, the pest
which never quitted the nest of cellars of which he was a citizen, raged
in the quarter with such intensity, that the extinction of its swarming
population was menaced. The haunt of this child was peculiarly visited.
All the children gradually sickened except himself; and one night when
he returned home he found the old woman herself dead, and surrounded
only by corpses. The child before this had slept on the same bed of
straw with a corpse, but then there were also breathing beings for his
companions. A night passed only with corpses seemed to him in itself
a kind of death. He stole out of the cellar, quitted the quarter of
pestilence, and after much wandering laid down near the door of a
factory. Fortune had guided him. Soon after break of day, he was woke
by the sound of the factory bell, and found assembled a crowd of
men, women, and children. The door opened, they entered, the child
accompanied them. The roll was called; his unauthorized appearance
noticed; he was questioned; his acuteness excited attention. A child
was wanted in the Wadding Hole, a place for the manufacture of waste and
damaged cotton, the refuse of the mills, which is here worked up into
counterpanes and coverlids. The nameless one was prefered to the vacant
post, received even a salary, more than that, a name; for as he had
none, he was christened on the spot--DEVILSDUST.

Devilsdust had entered life so early that at seventeen he combined
the experience of manhood with the divine energy of