o
complaint. The great city with its many factories hemmed them in on
every side, and seemed to shut out hope.

Faint and spiritless as they were, its streets were terrible to them.
After humbly asking for relief at some few doors, and being driven away,
they agreed to make their way out of it as speedily as they could, and
try if the people living in some lone house beyond would have more pity
on their worn out state.

They were dragging themselves along through the last street, and the
child felt that the time was close at hand when her enfeebled powers
would bear no more. There appeared before them, at this moment, going in
the same direction as themselves, a traveler on foot, who, with a
bundle of clothing strapped to his back, leaned upon a stout stick as he
walked, and read from a book which he held in his other hand.

It was not an easy matter to come up with him and ask his aid, for he
walked fast, and was a little distance in advance. At length he stopped,
to look more attentively at some passage in his book. Encouraged by a
ray of hope, the child shot on before her grandfather, and, going close
to the stranger without rousing him by the sound of her footsteps,
began, in a few faint words, to beg his help.

He turned his head. The child clapped her hands together, uttered a wild
shriek, and fell senseless at his feet.

It was the poor schoolmaster. No other than the poor schoolmaster.
Scarcely less moved and surprised by the sight of the child than she had
been on recognizing him, he stood, for a moment, silent, without even
the presence of mind to raise her from the ground.

But, quickly recovering himself, he threw down his stick and book, and,
dropping on one knee beside her, tried simple means as came to his mind,
to restore her to herself; while her grandfather, standing idly by,
wrung his hands, and begged her, with many words of love, to speak to
him, were it only a whisper.

"She appears to be quite worn out," said the schoolmaster, glancing
upward into his face. "You have used up all her strength, friend."

"She is dying of want," answered the old man. "I never thought how weak
and ill she was till now."

Casting a look upon him, half-angry and half-pitiful, the schoolmaster
took the child in his arms, and, bidding the old man gather up her
little basket and follow him directly, bore her away at his utmost
speed.

There was a small inn within sight, to which, it would seem, he had been
wal