, and
the needle and the thread were as far apart as ever, while the small imp
sitting quiet at her side was unsuspected. Not once nor twice only was
this little game successfully played. It used to enliven the hot, sleepy
afternoon, while the bars of light were crawling slowly--oh! so
slowly--across the floor. He knew school would be over when the outer
edge of sunlight touched the corner of the box-bed against the wall,
where the little girl that lived there and called the dame "Granny" was
put to sleep of a night.

His school experience was short, consisting, indeed, of but six bright
summer weeks, after which it had become his business to mind the baby,
while his mother went out to work. But the most vivid of the impressions
of his childhood were connected with that brief school career. Distinct
above the rest stood out the memory of one afternoon, when sitting on
his low stool he had seen dark smudges of shadow come straying, curling,
whirling across the squares of sunlight; when shouts had arisen in the
yard, and just as the dame had made Effie May hold out her hand for
dropping her thimble the third time, the back-door was burst open by
Ebenezer, the milkman, who cried out that the Dame's cow-house was on
fire. He could see the old lady now, with the child's shrinking fingers
firmly gripped in hers, her horny old hand arrested in the act of
descending on the little pink palm (which escaped scot-free in the
confusion) while she gazed for a moment, open-mouthed, at the speaker,
as though she had come to a word which _she_ couldn't spell, then jumped
up with surprising quickness and hobbled across the floor without her
stick, the point of her mob-cap nodding to every part of the room, while
she moved the whole of herself first to one side and then to the other
as she walked, like one of the geese waddling across the common.

"Goo back and mind yerr book!" cried the old lady to the sharp-eyed
little boy, who was peeping round her skirts. But he did not go back.
Who could, when they saw those tongues of flame shooting up, and the
volumes of smoke darkening the summer sky, as the wooden shed and the
palings near it caught and smoked and crackled, and heard the cries of
men and boys shouting for water and more water, which old Jack Foster,
and idiot Tom, and some women, with baskets hastily deposited by the
roadside, and even boys not much bigger than himself, were toiling to
bring as fast as possible in pails from the