e fell fast asleep on
the foot of the bed.

The night was warm, and he needed no coverlet, while from time to time
the hard-faced old woman went to look at her patient, giving him a
cursory glance, and then stopping at the bedside to gently stroke the
child's round cheek with her rough finger, and as the little fellow once
broke into a crowing laugh in his sleep, it had a strange effect upon
the old nurse, who slowly wiped the corners of her eyes with her apron,
and bent down and kissed him.

Hour after hour was chimed and struck by the great clock in the centre
of the town; and as midnight passed, the watchful old nurse did her
watching in a pleasant dream, in which she thought that she was once
more young, and that boy of hers who enlisted, went to India, and was
shot in an encounter with one of the hill tribes, was young again, and
that she was cutting bread and butter from a new loaf.

It was a very pleasant dream, and lasted a long time, for the six
o'clock bell was ringing before she awoke with a start and exclaimed--

"Bless me! must have just closed my eyes. Why, a pretty bairn!" she
said softly, as her hard face grew soft. "Sleeping like a top, and--
oh!"

She caught the sleeping child from the bed, and hurried out of the place
to lay him upon her own bed, where about an hour after he awoke, and
cried to go to the tramp.

But there was no tramp there for him to join. The rough man had gone on
a long journey, where he could not take the child, who cried bitterly,
as if he had lost the only one to whom he could cling, till the old
woman returned from a task she had had to fulfil, and with one of her
pockets in rather a bulgy state.

Her words and some bread and butter quieted the child, who seemed to
like her countenance, or read therein that something which attracts the
very young as beauty does those of older growth, and the addition of a
little brown sugar, into which he could dip a wet finger from time to
time, made them such friends that he made no objection to being washed.

"Yes, sir; went off quite quiet in his sleep," said the old nurse in
answer to the doctor's question.

"And the child?"

"Oh, I gave him a good wash, sir, which he needed badly," said the woman
volubly.

"Poor little wretch!" muttered the doctor as he went away. "A tramp's
child--a waif cast up by the way. Ah, Hippetts, I was right, you see:
it was not for long."

CHAPTER THREE.

DOCTOR GRAYSON'S THEORY.

"I