'how
wet she is, and that the damp streets are not a place for her?'

'I know it well, God help me,' he replied. 'What can I do!'

The man looked at Nell again, and gently touched her garments, from
which the rain was running off in little streams. 'I can give you
warmth,' he said, after a pause; 'nothing else. Such lodging as I
have, is in that house,' pointing to the doorway from which he had
emerged, 'but she is safer and better there than here. The fire is in
a rough place, but you can pass the night beside it safely, if you'll
trust yourselves to me. You see that red light yonder?'

They raised their eyes, and saw a lurid glare hanging in the dark sky;
the dull reflection of some distant fire.

'It's not far,' said the man. 'Shall I take you there? You were going
to sleep upon cold bricks; I can give you a bed of warm ashes--nothing
better.'

Without waiting for any further reply than he saw in their looks, he
took Nell in his arms, and bade the old man follow.

Carrying her as tenderly, and as easily too, as if she had been an
infant, and showing himself both swift and sure of foot, he led the way
through what appeared to be the poorest and most wretched quarter of
the town; and turning aside to avoid the overflowing kennels or running
waterspouts, but holding his course, regardless of such obstructions,
and making his way straight through them. They had proceeded thus, in
silence, for some quarter of an hour, and had lost sight of the glare
to which he had pointed, in the dark and narrow ways by which they had
come, when it suddenly burst upon them again, streaming up from the
high chimney of a building close before them.

'This is the place,' he said, pausing at a door to put Nell down and
take her hand. 'Don't be afraid. There's nobody here will harm you.'

It needed a strong confidence in this assurance to induce them to
enter, and what they saw inside did not diminish their apprehension and
alarm. In a large and lofty building, supported by pillars of iron,
with great black apertures in the upper walls, open to the external
air; echoing to the roof with the beating of hammers and roar of
furnaces, mingled with the hissing of red-hot metal plunged in water,
and a hundred strange unearthly noises never heard elsewhere; in this
gloomy place, moving like demons among the flame and smoke, dimly and
fitfully seen, flushed and tormented by the burning fires, and wielding
great weapons, a faulty b