, one of the men
endeavored to raise a laugh at the deformed lad, by asking him if he
didn't expect to see just such another angel at this minute, who had
lost her way in the field on the other side of the heap; but his jest
failed. The earnestness and devout emotion of the boy to the vision of
reality which his imagination, aided by the hues of sunset, had thus
exalted, were too much for the gross spirit of banter, and the speaker
shrank back into his dust-hovel, and affected to be very assiduous in
his work as the day was drawing to a close.

Before the day's work was ended, however, little Jem again had a glimpse
of the prize which had escaped him on the previous occasion. He
instantly darted, hands and head foremost, into the mass of cinders and
rubbish, and brought up a black mass of half-burnt parchment, entwined
with vegetable refuse, from which he speedily disengaged an oval frame
of gold, containing a miniature, still protected by its glass, but half
covered with mildew from the damp. He was in ecstasies at the prize.
Even the white cat-skins paled before it. In all probability some of the
men would have taken it from, him "to try and find the owner," but for
the presence and interference of his friends Peg Dotting and old
Doubleyear, whose great age, even among the present company, gave them a
certain position of respect and consideration. So all the rest now went
their way, leaving the three to examine and speculate on the prize.

The dust-heaps are a wonderful compound of things. A banker's check for
a considerable sum was found in one of them. It was on Herries and
Farquhar, in 1847. But bankers' checks, or gold and silver articles, are
the least valuable of their ingredients. Among other things, a variety
of useful chemicals are extracted. Their chief value, however, is for
the making of bricks. The fine cinder-dust and ashes are used in the
clay of the bricks, both for the red and gray stacks. Ashes are also
used as fuel between the layers of the clump of bricks, which could not
be burned in that position without them. The ashes burn away, and keep
the bricks open. Enormous quantities are used. In the brick-fields at
Uxbridge, near the Drayton Station, one of the brickmakers alone will
frequently contract for fifteen or sixteen thousand chaldron of this
cinder-dust, in one order. Fine coke or coke-dust, affects the market at
times as a rival; but fine coal, or coal-dust, never, because it would
spoil the