g but the clothing worn in the room
from which he had just escaped. His head was bare.

The dread of being found here by Mother Peter soon lifted him above
physical impediment or suffering. Through a hole in the fence he saw an
alley-way; and by the aid of an old barrel that stood in the yard, he
climbed to the top of the fence and let himself down on the other side,
falling a few feet. A sharp pain was felt in one of his ankles as his
feet touched the ground. He had sprained it in his leap from the window,
and now felt the first pangs attendant on the injury.

Limping along, he followed the narrow alley-way, and in a little while
came out upon a street some distance from the one in which Mother Peter
lived. There were very few people abroad, and no one noticed or spoke to
him as he went creeping along, every step sending a pain from the hurt
ankle to his heart. Faint with suffering and chilled to numbness, Andy
stumbled and fell as he tried, in crossing a street, to escape from a
sleigh that turned a corner suddenly. It was too late for the driver to
rein up his horse. One foot struck the child, throwing him out of the
track of the sleigh. He was insensible when taken up, bleeding and
apparently dead. A few people came out of the small houses in the
neighborhood, attracted by the accident, but no one knew the child or
offered to take him in.

There were two ladies in the sleigh, and both were greatly pained and
troubled. After a hurried consultation, one of them reached out her
hands for the child, and as she received and covered him with the
buffalo-robe said something to the driver, who turned his horse's head
and drove off at a rapid speed.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

_EVERY_ home for friendless children, every sin or poverty-blighted ward
and almost every hovel, garret and cellar where evil and squalor shrunk
from observation were searched for the missing child, but in vain. No
trace of him could be found. The agony of suspense into which Edith's
mind was brought was beginning to threaten her reason. It was only by
the strongest effort at self-compulsion that she could keep herself to
duty among the poor and suffering, and well for her it was that she did
not fail here; it was all that held her to safe mooring.

One day, as she was on her way home from some visit of mercy, a lady
who was passing in a carriage called to her from the window, at the same
time ordering her driver to stop. The carriage drew up to