he went on; "you can wash and iron, you say; you
are young and strong: those are your friends. Depend on them, and they'll
be better friends to you than any other."

The poor woman was silent, leaning her head down on her slumbering child,
and crying to herself; and thus they drove on, through many long and
narrow streets, with gas flaring from the shops, but with few people in
the streets, and these hurrying shivering along the pavement, so intense
was the cold. Anon they stopped at a large pair of gates; the
manufacturer rung a bell, which he could reach from his gig, and the
gates presently were flung open, and they drove into a spacious yard,
with a large handsome house, having a bright lamp burning before it, on
one side of the yard, and tall warehouses on the other.

"Show this poor woman and her child to Mrs. Craddock's, James," said Mr.
Spires, "and tell Mrs. Craddock to make them very comfortable; and if you
will come to my warehouse to-morrow," added he, addressing the poor
woman, "perhaps I can be of some use to you."

The poor woman poured out her heartfelt thanks, and following the old
man-servant, soon disappeared, hobbling over the pebbly pavement with her
living load, stiffened almost to stone by her fatigue and her cold ride.

We must not pursue too minutely our narrative Mrs. Deg was engaged to do
the washing and getting up of Mr. Spires' linen, and the manner in which
she executed her task insured her recommendations to all their friends.
Mrs. Deg was at once in full employ. She occupied a neat house in a yard
near the meadows below the town, and in those meadows she might be seen
spreading out her clothes to whiten on the grass, attended by her stout
little boy. In the same yard lived a shoemaker, who had two or three
children of about the same age as Mrs. Deg's child. The children, as time
went on, became playfellows. Little Simon might be said to have the free
run of the shoemaker's house, and he was the more attracted thither by
the shoemaker's birds, and by his flute, on which he often played after
his work was done.

Mrs. Deg took a great friendship for this shoemaker; and he and his wife,
a quiet, kind-hearted woman, were almost all the acquaintances that she
cultivated. She had found out her husband's parents, but they were not of
a description that at all pleased her. They were old and infirm, but they
were of the true pauper breed, a sort of person whom Mrs. Deg had been
taught to avoid