ll stitched she fared well enough;
but when she had carried home the work, and received the money, there
was a day, sometimes two or three, in which gin ruled, and the women
first shouted and sang songs, and at last lay about the floor in every
stage of drunkenness. Gradually chances for work slipped away; the
machines were given up, and the partnership of workers dissolved, and at
twelve, Nan and the baby were beggars and the mother in prison for
aggravated assault on a neighbor. She died there, and thus settled one
problem, and now came the other, how was Nan to live?

Old Widgeon answered this question. They had always been good friends
from the day he had seen her standing, holding the baby, crippled and
hopelessly deformed from its birth. His barrow was almost empty, and the
donkey pointing his long ears toward the stable.

"Get in," he said, "an' I'll give you a bit of a ride," and Nan,
speechless with joy, climbed in and was driven to the stable, and once
there, watched the unharnessing and received some stray oranges as she
finally turned away. From that day old Widgeon became her patron saint.
She had shot up into a tall girl, shrinking from those about her, and
absorbed chiefly in the crooked little figure, still "the baby;" but
tall as she might be, she was barely twelve, and how should she hire a
machine and pay room rent and live?

Widgeon settled all that.

"You know how to stitch away at them trousers?" he had said, and Nan
nodded.

"Then I'll see you through the first week or two," he said; "but, mind!
don't you whisper it, or I'll 'ave hevery distressed female in the court
down on me, and there's enough hof 'em now."

Nan nodded again, but he saw the tears in her eyes, and regarded words
as quite unnecessary. The sweater asked no questions when she came for a
bundle of work, nor did she tell him that she alone was now responsible.
She had learned to stitch. Skill came with practice, and she might as
well have such slight advantage as arose from being her mother's
messenger.

So Nan's independent life began, and so it went on. She grew no taller,
but did grow older, her silent gravity making her seem older still. It
was hard work. She had never liked tea, and she loathed the sight and
smell of either beer or spirits, old experience having made them
hateful. Thus she had none of the nervous stimulant which keeps up the
ordinary worker, and with small knowledge of any cookery but boiling
potatoes