he little 'uns--and they paid us 6d., 4d., and
2d. a week, or whatever they liked; and we done werry well with that
school, and always taught religion and the catechism; and I might have
been continuin' of it now if that nasty, pokin', competitionin' Board
School hadn't come along, which it finished our little lot--pretty sharp
it did--and left us starvin'."

The sister, shortly after this terrific crisis in their affairs, was
carried into the hospital, and, after three months of terrible pain,
which she bore like a martyr, went to join in heavenly places the "poor
mother" and the father who had been in some elusive fashion connected
with sublunary drains.

"And after that," says Miss Stipp, getting up and resting her hands on
the pail of dirty water, and looking down into it as if she saw the
faces of her poor mother, her sister, and all the dead babies of the
other sister shining up at her from the muddy bottom, "I came on the
parish, and I've been on it ever since, and nice kind gentlemen they
are, and I couldn't be treated better."

"People are kind to you?" I inquire.

"Very kind to me they are," she answers. "I often get a shillin' given
to me in the street, and the other evenin' a lady in the Boro'--nicely
dressed, she was, in black--asked me if I wouldn't like a New Testament,
and I said, 'Yuss, I would,' and she give me one; and I told her that I
was converted, not when I was born, but when I was confirmed in St.
George's Church; and the bishop gave us a beautiful address he did, and
I felt werry much better when he laid his hands on my head, and after
he give us the blessin'. If my hands wasn't so black, I'd show you the
cards and things. I've kep 'em ever since--yuss. I've still got 'The Vow
Performed,' or whatever it is called. The wicked woman downstairs, she
hasn't taken _that_. Oh, a wicked woman she is, a _very_ wicked woman;
but I'll have the law on her. Ah!"

* * * * *

I ask her if--what with the cat and the woman downstairs, and all her
relatives in heaven--she does not sometimes sigh for the next world.

"I'll be ready when my time comes," she replies confidently, and with
rather a sly grin, "but I'm werry well content to stay where I am till
I'm called, I am. I don't complain of nothink, I don't, excep' this
beastly winder-pane which lets the draught in somethink cruel, it does,
enough it is to blow me out of bed; and that awful devil of a woman
downstairs; an