dear is dead,
And, oh! I am so hungry, sir--a penny please for bread;
All day I have been asking, but no one heeds my cry,
Will you not give me something, or surely I must die?

"Please give me a penny, sir; you won't say 'no' to me,
Because I'm poor and ragged, sir, and oh! so cold you see;
We were not always begging--we once were rich like you,
But father died a drunkard, and mother she died too."

_Chorus_--

"Please give me a penny, sir; my mother dear is dead,
And, oh! I am so hungry, sir--a penny please for bread."

At the end of the first verse she found it necessary to run her eye over
the paper before beginning the second.

Perhaps it was just as well for her serenity that she did not look up as
she sang. For just as soon as her voice rose into anything approaching a
tune--it was near the end of the first verse--a face looked down upon
her from the corner window of the second story of the chemist's house.

It was a young face, early old--white and drawn and marked by the
unmistakable lines of suffering.

Betty knew nothing about the trouble of the world in those days; nothing
of suffering, nothing of sorrow. And the woman above her knew of all.
She leaned over the window-sill and her eyes smiled pityingly as they
rested on the small bared head.

She had been praying her morning prayer near the open window, begging
for strength to bear her sorrows, and for as many as might be to be
taken from her, when Betty's voice quavered right up to her window.

She looked down, and there was the small singer's curly brown head. She
looked longer, and saw Betty clasp a bare foot in one hand and stand on
one foot, drop the foot from her hand and reverse the action.

It was merely a habit of Betty's, but the woman found in it a sign that
the child was worn and weary--worn and weary before seven o'clock in the
morning.

She drew her dressing-gown around her, searched her dress pocket for her
purse, and leaning out dropped sixpence upon the pavement close to the
little singer.

Betty stopped at once and looked around her, down the street and around
the corner; at the shop shutters and door, but never once so high as the
windows.

The woman smiled to herself.

"Poor little mite," she said. "I must remember even the little children
have their griefs! It should make me grumble less."

Betty ran along the street in the direction John had taken. She felt she
_must_ te