the shop of Mrs. Fipps, the milliner, in which his
mother had drawn her last breath, and in which Frances Allan had found
and fallen in love with him, was luxurious, he lay upon a bed of straw
thrown into a dark corner, tossing with fever and in his delirium,
literally "babbling of green fields."

The kind-hearted, but ignorant and uncleanly slattern who sought with
"lodgings to let" to keep the souls of herself and family in their
bodies, gave him as much attention as the demands of a numerous brood of
little slatterns and a drunken husband would permit, and sighed with
real sorrow as she admitted that the "poor gentleman" was in a very bad
way. It was her opinion he had seen better days she confided to the
three other lodgers who were just then renting the three straw beds in
the three other corners of the same dark, squalid and evil-smelling
room. He was "so soft-spoken and elegant-like, if he _was_ poor as a
church mouse. Pity he had no folks nor nobody to keer nothin' about
'im."

It was not at once that Mrs. Clemm found him. She had sought him
diligently in what would to-day be known as the slum districts of the
city, descending the scale of respectability lower and lower until she
thought she had reached the bottom, but without success.

Then, upon the fourth or fifth day of her search, late in the afternoon,
when the little Virginia was watching anxiously from the sitting-room
window for "Muddie's" return, a wagon stopped before her door and out of
it and into the house was borne a stretcher upon which lay an apparently
dying man--ghastly, unshaven, and muttering broken unintelligible
sentences.

Keeping pace with the wagon as it crept along the street, might have
been seen the stately, sad-eyed Widow Clemm. When the wagon stopped, she
stopped, and directed the careful lifting of the stretcher from it. Then
she turned and opened the door of her small house and led the way to her
neat bed-chamber where, upon her own immaculate bed, the sick man was
gently laid--henceforth, as long as need be, a cot in the sitting-room
would be good enough for her.

The little Virginia, her soft eyes filled with wonder, had followed her
mother upon tip-toe.

"Who is it, Muddie?" she questioned in an awed whisper.

The anxiety in the widow's face gave place to a look of exaltation which
fairly transfigured her. Her deep eyes shone with the hoarded love for
the son so long denied her. She gathered her little daughter to her