the mistake of entering into argument.

"Is he ill?" The boy nods. "Is he worse?" Another nod. "Has he gone
home to his club?" The boy evidently has a revelation to make, but
would consider it undignified to make it except as a denial of
something to the contrary. He sees his way after a brief reflection.

"He ain't gone. He's been took."

"He's been taken? How has he been taken?"

"On a perambulance. Goin' easy! But he didn't say nothin'. Not harf
a word!"

"Had he fainted?" But this boy has another characteristic--when he
cannot understand he will not admit it. He keeps silence, and goes
on absorbing the railing. Rosalind asks further: "Was he dead?"

"It'd take a lawyer to tell that, missis."

"I can't stand here in the cold, my boy. Come in, and come up and
tell us." So he comes up, and Rosalind speaks to the nurse in the
other room, who comes; and then they turn seriously to getting the
boy's story.

He is all the easier for examination from the fact that he is
impressed, if not awed, by his surroundings. All the bounce is knocked
out of him, now that his foot is no longer on his native heath, the
street. Witness that the subject of his narrative, who would certainly
have been the old bloke where there was a paling to suck, has become
a simple pronoun, and no more!

"I see him afore, missis," he says. "That time wot I lighted him
round for twopence. And he says to come again in three-quarters of
an hour. And I says yes, I says. And he says not to be late. Nor yet
I shouldn't, only the water run so slow off the main, and I was
kep.... Yes, missis--a drorin' of it off in their own pails at the
balkny house by the mooze, where the supply is froze...."

"I see, you got a job to carry up pails of water from that thing that
sticks up in the road?"

"Yes, missis; by means of the turncock. Sim'lar I got wet. But I didn't
go to be late. It warn't much, in the manner of speakin'. I was on his
'eels, clost."

"You caught him?"

"Heard him hoarckin' in the fog, and I says to my mate--boy by the name
of 'Ucklebridge, only chiefly called Slimy, to distinguish him--I
says--I says that was my guv'nor, safe and square, by the token of the
sound of it. And then I catches him up in the fog, follerin' by the
sound. My word, missis, he _was_ bad! Wanted to holler me over the
coals, he did, for behind my time. I could hear him wantin' to do it.
But he couldn't come by the breath."

Poor Old Jack! The two women look a