seek it. The boys rushed off to
get him such things as their mother had ready, and whilst he
partook of the wholesome and appetising meal prepared for him,
Joseph burst out with his pent-up weariness of the shut-up life,
his longing to be free of the house and the city, and his earnest
desire that his father would permit him and Benjamin to go forth
and shift for themselves in the country until the terrible
visitation was past.

The father listened with a grave face. He too began to have a great
fear that the whole city was doomed to be swept away, and although
upheld in his resolve to do his duty, so long as he was able, by
his strong and fervent faith in the goodness and mercy of God, he
was disposed to the opinion that all who remained would in turn be
carried off victims to the fearful pestilence. Had he known from
the beginning how terrible it would become in time, he sometimes
said to himself, he would at least have made shift to send his
family away; but now that they were engrossed in works of piety and
charity, he could not feel it right to bid them cease their labours
of love, nor did he feel any temptation to quit his own post. Yet
this made him the more ready to listen to the eager petition of his
boys, and to consider the project which had formed itself in the
quick brain of Joseph.

"Father, I have thought of it so much these past days. We are sound
in health. Thou couldst get us the papers without which men say
none can pass the watch upon the roads. With them we can sally
forth, with a small provision of money and food, and make our way
either by boat to the farm at Greenwich where the other 'prentice
boys live, and where there would be a welcome for us always, or
else northward to our aunt beyond Islington, who will be hungering
for news of us, and who will be rejoiced, I am very sure, to give
us a welcome and to hear of the welfare of all, even though we come
to her from the land of the shadow of death."

"Ay, verily do ye!" exclaimed the father, whose phrase Joseph had
picked up and quoted. "Heaven send that my poor sister be yet
numbered among the living. I know not whether the fell disease has
wrought havoc beyond the limits of the city in that direction; but
at the first it raged more fiercely north and west than with us,
and God alone knows who are taken and who are left!"

"Then, father, may we go?" asked Benjamin, eagerly.

The father looked from one boy to the other with the glance of o