The thought of her naturally induced him to draw from his pocket the little handkerchief she had forced upon him.

It was of fine material, though very small, and as he held it up, he perceived in the corner, worked in red silk, the name Ellen L."

፡፡

"Surely," he muttered to himself, "that gipsy woman can't be her mother, or that man her father. They don't to me look like her relations at all. What a strange thing of her to make me take this pretty little handkerchief! I suppose it was because

I

gave her that penny, and she didn't like the idea of accepting it without my having something of hers in return. But I'm sure she needn't have thought that, poor little thing! How ill she looked! and how dreadful it must be to be ill in such a place, exposed to the air and bad weather and draughts, and perhaps the people not too kind to her! Oh, dear!"

If Guy had pushed his reflections a little further, he might have found in the incident of this poor sick child a moral to his fancy picture of the hermit life, which he had been contemplating so complacently when the van came in view.

He had, in his imagination, drawn his hermit in such weather as then shone upon himself, and with the health and strength which he felt coursing through his own veins. He did not admit into his portrait the possibility of sickness, of accident, or the many chances of storm and tempest to which

men would naturally, under such circumstances, be exposed. If he could have contemplated, what in fact has more than once occurred, a broken limb disabling the hapless anchorite, and compelling him to starve and miserably die where he fell, until his whitened bones were discovered years afterwards by a stray foot which happened to pass that way, he would surely have confessed the truth of the Scripture saying, “It is not good that man should be alone."

CHAPTER IX.

AN ADVENTURE-MR AND MRS TOTTLES-TRUE KINDNESS -A SILENT COMPANION-FIRST SIGHT OF LONDON.

PHE incident related at the close of the last chapter occurred within a mile or so of the old town of Dartford, through whose dull and uninteresting streets Guy passed about half an hour afterwards.

He only stopped there a sufficient time to purchase a penny loaf and a cold sausage, which he saw displayed among some other similar edibles in a shop window.

"They'll make me a capital dinner," he said to himself, as he wrapped them in a piece of paper, begged from the shop-woman for the purpose, and stowed them carefully away in his jacket pocket.

When again upon the road, after leaving the town a mile or so behind him, he met, as before, so few pedestrians, that often, for ten good minutes together, he was entirely alone, and had but occasionally to draw close up on one or the other side of the highway, when a stage coach or waggon or some other vehicle came rumbling along it.

As it happened that some fresh flint stones had been recently laid down for a long distance on each

side, and there was no footpath at the point that Guy had reached, he walked along in the middle of the road, so as to save his boots and feet from being cut to pieces. He had just turned a corner where a branch road ran into the one along which he was marching, when a chaise-cart, driven at great speed, came behind him unawares, and narrowly escaped knocking him down. At the same time, the driver of the conveyance, a well dressed, but irascible looking little man, as he partly reined in his horse, saluted him with :

"Why don't you look where you're going, you young stupid? I might have run over you!"

Half the words did not reach Guy's ear, for the speaker gave his horse the rein, and was soon bowling along in a cloud of dust.

"I might say," said Guy, by way of criticism on the other's impatient speech, "Why don't you look where you are going to; driving along at that rate? Hulloa! what's yonder?"

The cause of his exclamation was a very neat and rather large brown paper parcel in the middle of the road, about a dozen paces ahead of him, and which had evidently been dropped from some conveyance.

"It must have tumbled out of that chaise-cart," said Guy, as he picked it up, at the same time setting off at his utmost speed after the vehicle that had nearly cut short his own career, and exclaiming every now and then at the top of his voice, "Ay Ay!!" to attract the driver's attention.