had been very warm, and the man was eating, with no
great appetite, a sumptuous supper of German sausage and bread. The
sausage had been wrapped in a piece of newspaper, which spread out upon
his knees, was now doing duty as a tablecloth. Having finished his meal,
the man lazily glanced at the paper; but finding its contents, at first,
to possess no particular interest, he was about to crumple it up and throw
it away, when his eye lighted on a paragraph which induced him to pause.
He smoothed out the paper, and raised it nearer to his eyes.

"Well," he muttered, "I ain't much of a scholard; but I means to get to
the bottom o' this 'ere."

With intense eagerness, he began to spell out the words of the paragraph
which had arrested his attention. It was headed, "'The Golden Shoemaker'
recovers his daughter, supposed to have been stolen by tramps in her
childhood." From line to line he laboured painfully on. Many times his
progress was stayed by some formidable word; and again and again he was
interrupted by a violent cough; but at length he had ascertained the
contents of the paragraph. It contained as much as was known of the
history of Marian Horn. It told how, at the age of five, she had, as was
supposed, run away from home, and, as recently-discovered circumstances
seemed to indicate, fallen into the hands of evil persons; and how all
trace of her had then been lost until a few weeks afterwards, when, as had
now become known, she was found, a wretched little waif, upon the highway,
and adopted by Mr. and Mrs. Burton. The circumstances of her after life
were then set forth; and the narrative concluded with a glowing account of
her re-union with her friends. The tramp deeply pondered this romantic
story.

"Ah," he said to himself, "that must ha' been the little wench as me and
the old woman took to. It was somewhere here away. I remember about the
shoe as she'd lost. They must ha' found it. The old woman cut the other
shoe, same as it says here. It were a bad thing of us to take the kid,
that it were."

At this point the man was seized with a violent fit of coughing. When it
had subsided, he resumed his half-muttered meditations. "Well, I'm glad as
the little 'un got took care on, arter all, and has got back to her own
natural born father at last; for she were a game little wench, and no
mistake. She were a poor people's child when we got hold on her. But I've
heerd tell o' 'the Golden Shoemaker,' as they calls him.