isistratus,--a question that would never have
occurred to my father. He never asked who or what the sick papas of poor
children were when the children pulled him by the lappet of his coat.
"Who is papa?"

The child looked hard at me, and the big tears rolled from those large,
luminous eyes, but quite silently. At this moment a full-grown figure
filled up the threshold, and emerging from the shadow, presented to us
the aspect of a stout, well-favored young woman. She dropped a courtesy,
and then said, mincingly,--

"Oh, miss, you ought to have waited for me, and not alarmed the
gentlefolks by running upstairs in that way! If you please, sir, I was
settling with the cabman, and he was so imperent,--them low fellows
always are, when they have only us poor women to deal with, sir, and--"

"But what is the matter?" cried I, for my father had taken the child in
his arms soothingly, and she was now weeping on his breast.

"Why, you see, sir [another courtesy], the gent only arrived last night
at our hotel, sir,--the Lamb, close by Lunnun Bridge,--and he was taken
ill, and he's not quite in his right mind like; so we sent for
the doctor, and the doctor looked at the brass plate on the gent's
carpet-bag, sir, and then he looked into the 'Court Guide,' and he said,
'There is a Mr. Caxton in Great Russell Street,--is he any relation?'
and this young lady said, 'That's my papa's brother, and we were going
there.' And so, sir, as the Boots was out, I got into a cab, and miss
would come with me, and--"

"Roland--Roland ill! Quick, quick, quick!" cried my father, and with the
child still in his arms he ran down the stairs. I followed with his hat,
which of course he had forgotten. A cab, by good luck, was passing our
very door; but the chambermaid would not let us enter it till she had
satisfied herself that it was not the same she had dismissed. This
preliminary investigation completed, we entered and drove to the Lamb.

The chambermaid, who sat opposite, passed the time in ineffectual
overtures to relieve my father of the little girl,--who still clung
nestling to his breast,--in a long epic, much broken into episodes, of
the causes which had led to her dismissal of the late cabman, who, to
swell his fare, had thought proper to take a "circumbendibus!"--and
with occasional tugs at her cap, and smoothings down of her gown, and
apologies for being such a figure, especially when her eyes rested on my
satin cravat, or drooped on my