head off? This
cross-eyed, lop-eared loafer, lurching against the lamp-post! shall we
pass with a careless wag and a 'how-do,' or become locked in a life and
death struggle? Impossible to say. This coming corner, now, 'Ware! Is
anybody waiting round there to kill me, or not?"

But the trusting face beside me nerved me. As reward in lonely places I
would let her hold my hand.

A second advantage I derived from her company was that of being less
trampled on, less walked over, less swept aside into doorway or gutter
than when alone. A pretty, winsome face had this little maid, if Memory
plays me not kindly false; but also she had a vocabulary; and when the
blind idiot, male or female, instead of passing us by walking round us,
would, after the custom of the blind idiot, seek to gain the other side
of us by walking through us, she would use it.

"Now, then, where yer coming to, old glass-eye? We ain't sperrits. Can't
yer see us?"

And if they attempted reply, her child's treble, so strangely at
variance with her dainty appearance, would only rise more shrill.

"Garn! They'd run out of 'eads when they was making you. That's only a
turnip wot you've got stuck on top of yer!" I offer but specimens.

Nor was it of the slightest use attempting personal chastisement, as
sometimes an irate lady or gentleman would be foolish enough to do. As
well might an hippopotamus attempt to reprove a terrier. The only result
was to provide comedy for the entire street.

On these occasions our positions were reversed, I being the admiring
spectator of her prowess. Yet to me she was ever meek, almost
irritatingly submissive. She found out where I lived and would often
come and wait for me for hours, her little face pressed tight against
the iron railings, until either I came out or shook my head at her from
my bedroom window, when she would run off, the dying away into silence
of her pattering feet leaving me a little sad.

I think I cared for her in a way, yet she never entered into my
day-dreams, which means that she existed for me only in the outer world
of shadows that lay round about me and was not of my real life.

Also, I think she was unwise, introducing me to the shop, for children
and dogs--one seems unconsciously to bracket them in one's thoughts--are
snobbish little wretches. If only her father had been a dealer in
firewood I could have soothed myself by imagining mistakes. It was
a common occurrence, as I well knew, for c