, where for some time had dwelt an old French
refugee, by name Mr. Pastoureau, one of those whom the persecution of the
Huguenots by the French king had brought over to this country. With this
old man lived a little lad, who went by the name of Henry Thomas. He
remembered to have lived in another place a short time before, near to
London, too, amongst looms and spinning-wheels, and a great deal of
psalm-singing and church-going, and a whole colony of Frenchmen.

There he had a dear, dear friend, who died and whom he called aunt. She
used to visit him in his dreams sometimes; and her face, though it was
homely, was a thousand times dearer to him than that of Mrs. Pastoureau,
Bon Papa Pastoureau's new wife, who came to live with him after aunt went
away. And there, at Spittlefields, as it used to be called, lived Uncle
George, who was a weaver too, but used to tell Harry that he was a little
gentleman, and that his father was a captain, and his mother an angel.

When he said so, Bon Papa used to look up from the loom, where he was
embroidering beautiful silk flowers, and say, "Angel! she belongs to the
Babylonish Scarlet Woman." Bon Papa was always talking of the Scarlet
Woman. He had a little room where he always used to preach and sing hymns
out of his great old nose. Little Harry did not like the preaching; he
liked better the fine stories which aunt used to tell him. Bon Papa's wife
never told him pretty stories; she quarrelled with Uncle George, and he
went away.

After this Harry's Bon Papa, and his wife and two children of her own that
she brought with her, came to live at Ealing. The new wife gave her
children the best of everything, and Harry many a whipping, he knew not
why. Besides blows, he got ill names from her, which need not be set down
here, for the sake of old Mr. Pastoureau, who was still kind sometimes.
The unhappiness of those days is long forgiven, though they cast a shade
of melancholy over the child's youth, which will accompany him, no doubt,
to the end of his days: as those tender twigs are bent the trees grow
afterward; and he, at least, who has suffered as a child, and is not quite
perverted in that early school of unhappiness, learns to be gentle and
long-suffering with little children.

Harry was very glad when a gentleman dressed in black, on horseback, with
a mounted servant behind him, came to fetch him away from Ealing. The
_noverca_, or unjust stepmother, who had neglected him for her