at the worst I can get a year's character from
Dutton, so that if I can't get anything else to do I can get the same
sort of place again, and as I am a year older than I was when he took
me, and can tie up parcels neatly now, I ought to get a little more
anyhow. You see I shall be safe enough, and though I have never
grumbled, you know, mother--have I?--I think I would rather do
anything than be a grocer's boy. I would rather, when I grow up, be a
bricklayer's laborer, or a plowman, or do any what I call man's work,
than be pottering about behind a counter, with a white apron on,
weighing out sugar and currants."

"I can't blame you, George," Mrs. Andrews said with a sigh. "It's
natural, my boy. If I get my eyesight and my health again, when you
grow up to be a man we will lay by a little money, and you and I will
go out together to one of the colonies. It will be easier to rise
again there than here, and with hard work both of us might surely hope
to get on. There must be plenty of villages in Australia and Canada
where I could do well with teaching, and you could get work in
whatever way you may be inclined to. So, my boy, let us set that
before us. It will be something to hope for and work for, and will
cheer us to go through whatever may betide us up to that time."

"Yes, mother," George said. "It will be comfort indeed to have
something to look forward to. Nothing can comfort me much to-day; but
if anything could it would be some such plan as that."

The last words he said to his mother as, blinded with tears, he kissed
her before starting to work, were:

"I shall think of our plan every day, and look forward to that more
than anything else in the world--next to your coming to me again."

At ten o'clock Dr. Jeffries drove up to Mrs. Andrews' humble lodging
in a brougham instead of his ordinary gig, having borrowed the
carriage from one of the few of his patients who kept such a vehicle,
on purpose to take Mrs. Andrews, for she was so weak and worn that he
was sure she would not be able to sit upright in a gig for the three
miles that had to be traversed. He managed in the course of his rounds
to pass the workhouse again in the afternoon, and brought George,
before he left work, a line written in pencil on a leaf torn from his
pocketbook:

"My darling, I am very comfortable. Everything is clean and
nice, and the doctor and people kind. Do not fret about
me.--Your loving mother."

Although Geo