e shivering in your thin clothes--to be sure it is autumn. Ugh! how
cold the water is! I hope I shall not be ill. But no, I shall not be
that! Give me a little more, and you may have a sip too, but only a
little sip, for you must not accustom yourself to it, my poor dear
child!"

And she stepped up to the bridge on which the boy stood, and came
ashore. The water dripped from the straw matting she had wound round
her, and from her gown.

"I work and toil as much as ever I can," she said, "but I do it
willingly, if I can only manage to bring you up honestly and well, my
boy."

As she spoke, a somewhat older woman came towards them. She was poor
enough to behold, lame of one leg, and with a large false curl hanging
down over one of her eyes, which was a blind one. The curl was
intended to cover the eye, but it only made the defect more striking.
This was a friend of the laundress. She was called among the
neighbours, "Lame Martha with the curl."

"Oh, you poor thing! How you work, standing there in the water!" cried
the visitor. "You really require something to warm you; and yet
malicious folks cry out about the few drops you take!" And in a few
minutes' time the mayor's late speech was reported to the laundress;
for Martha had heard it all, and she had been angry that a man could
speak as he had done to a woman's own child, about the few drops the
mother took: and she was the more angry, because the mayor on that
very day was giving a great feast, at which wine was drunk by the
bottle--good wine, strong wine. "A good many will take more than they
need--but that's not called drinking. _They_ are good; but _you_ are
good for nothing!" cried Martha, indignantly.

"Ah, so he spoke to you, my child?" said the washerwoman; and her lips
trembled as she spoke. "So he says you have a mother who is good for
nothing? Well, perhaps he's right, but he should not have said it to
the child. Still, I have had much misfortune from that house."

"You were in service there when the mayor's parents were alive, and
lived in that house. That is many years ago: many bushels of salt have
been eaten since then, and we may well be thirsty;" and Martha smiled.
"The mayor has a great dinner party to-day. The guests were to have
been put off, but it was too late, and the dinner was already cooked.
The footman told me about it. A letter came a little while ago, to say
that the younger brother had died in Copenhagen."

"Died!" repeated the lau