tle Bella, she gave her her directions.

'Mammy will carry Bella; and when Bella goes past the poor man, she
shall give him the cake over mammy's shoulder. Poor man is so
hungry; and Bella and mammy have plenty to eat, and to spare.'

The child's heart was touched by the idea of hunger, and her little
arm was outstretched ready for the moment her mother's hurried steps
took her brushing past the startled, trembling Philip.

'Poor man, eat this; Bella not hungry.'

They were the first words he had ever heard his child utter. The
echoes of them rang in his ears as he stood endeavouring to hide his
disfigured face by looking over the parapet of the bridge down upon
the stream running away towards the ocean, into which his hot tears
slowly fell, unheeded by the weeper. Then he changed the intention
with which he had set out upon his nightly walk, and turned back to
his lodging.

Of course the case was different with Sylvia; she would have
forgotten the whole affair very speedily, if it had not been for
little Bella's frequent recurrence to the story of the hungry man,
which had touched her small sympathies with the sense of an
intelligible misfortune. She liked to act the dropping of the bun
into the poor man's hand as she went past him, and would take up any
article near her in order to illustrate the gesture she had used.
One day she got hold of Hester's watch for this purpose, as being of
the same round shape as the cake; and though Hester, for whose
benefit the child was repeating the story in her broken language for
the third or fourth time, tried to catch the watch as it was
intended that she should (she being the representative of the
'hungry man' for the time being), it went to the ground with a smash
that frightened the little girl, and she began to cry at the
mischief she had done.

'Don't cry, Bella,' said Hester. 'Niver play with watches again. I
didn't see thee at mine, or I'd ha' stopped thee in time. But I'll
take it to old Darley's on th' quay-side, and maybe he'll soon set
it to rights again. Only Bella must niver play with watches again.'

'Niver no more!' promised the little sobbing child. And that evening
Hester took her watch down to old Darley's.

This William Darley was the brother of the gardener at the rectory;
the uncle to the sailor who had been shot by the press-gang years
before, and to his bed-ridden sister. He was a clever mechanician,
and his skill as a repairer of watches and chron