d I take care of you too,
Grandy,--don't I? I prayed for that too; and as to carriages," added
Sophy, with superb air, "I don't care if I am never in a carriage as
long as I live; and you know I have been in a van, which is bigger than
a carriage, and I didn't like that at all. But how came people to behave
so ill to you, Grandy?"

"I never said people behaved ill to me, Sophy."

"Did not they take away the carpets and silk curtains, and all the fine
things you had as a little boy?"

"I don't know," replied Waife, with a puzzled look, "that people
actually took them away; but they melted away.

"However, I had much still to be thankful for: I was so strong, and
had such high spirits, Sophy, and found people not behaving ill to
me,--quite the contrary, so kind. I found no Crane (she monster) as you
did, my little angel. Such prospects before me, if I had walked straight
towards them! But I followed my own fancy, which led me zigzag; and now
that I would stray back into the high road, you see before you a man
whom a Justice of the Peace could send to the treadmill for presuming to
live without a livelihood."

SOPHY.--"Not without a livelihood!--the what did you call
it?--independent income,--that is, the Three Pounds, Grandy?"

WAIFE (admiringly).--"Sensible child. That is true. Yes, Heaven is very
good to me still. Ah! what signifies fortune? How happy I was with my
dear Lizzy, and yet no two persons could live more from hand to mouth."

SOPHY (rather jealously).--"tizzy?"

WAIFE (with moistened eyes, and looking down).--"My wife. She was only
spared to me two years: such sunny years! And how grateful I ought to be
that she did not live longer. She was saved--such--such--such shame and
misery!" A long pause.

Waife resumed, with a rush from memory, as if plucking himself from the
claws of a harpy,--"What's the good of looking back? A man's gone self
is a dead thing. It is not I--now tramping this road, with you to lean
upon--whom I see, when I would turn to look behind on that which I once
was: it is another being, defunct and buried; and when I say to
myself, 'that being did so and so,' it is like reading an epitaph on
a tombstone. So, at last, solitary and hopeless, I came back to my own
land; and I found you,--a blessing greater than I had ever dared
to count on. And how was I to maintain you, and take you from that
long-nosed alligator called Crane, and put you in womanly gentle
hands; for I never thought