to the place she had lately occupied,
as if to assure himself that it was really the child so near him,
looked inquiringly into her face.

'I feared you were ill,' she said. 'The other men are all in motion,
and you are so very quiet.'

'They leave me to myself,' he replied. 'They know my humour. They
laugh at me, but don't harm me in it. See yonder there--that's my
friend.'

'The fire?' said the child.

'It has been alive as long as I have,' the man made answer. 'We talk
and think together all night long.'

The child glanced quickly at him in her surprise, but he had turned his
eyes in their former direction, and was musing as before.

'It's like a book to me,' he said--'the only book I ever learned to
read; and many an old story it tells me. It's music, for I should know
its voice among a thousand, and there are other voices in its roar. It
has its pictures too. You don't know how many strange faces and
different scenes I trace in the red-hot coals. It's my memory, that
fire, and shows me all my life.'

The child, bending down to listen to his words, could not help
remarking with what brightened eyes he continued to speak and muse.

'Yes,' he said, with a faint smile, 'it was the same when I was quite a
baby, and crawled about it, till I fell asleep. My father watched it
then.'

'Had you no mother?' asked the child.

'No, she was dead. Women work hard in these parts. She worked herself
to death they told me, and, as they said so then, the fire has gone on
saying the same thing ever since. I suppose it was true. I have
always believed it.'

'Were you brought up here, then?' said the child.

'Summer and winter,' he replied. 'Secretly at first, but when they
found it out, they let him keep me here. So the fire nursed me--the
same fire. It has never gone out.'

'You are fond of it?' said the child.

'Of course I am. He died before it. I saw him fall down--just there,
where those ashes are burning now--and wondered, I remember, why it
didn't help him.'

'Have you been here ever since?' asked the child.

'Ever since I came to watch it; but there was a while between, and a
very cold dreary while it was. It burned all the time though, and
roared and leaped when I came back, as it used to do in our play days.
You may guess, from looking at me, what kind of child I was, but for
all the difference between us I was a child, and when I saw you in the
street to-night, you put me in mind of