to a back room heaped
with rags.

"I want that pretty frock," said she, "and that little bonnet and your
petticoat. Come! Take them off!"

Florence, dreadfully frightened, obeyed. The old woman took away her
shoes, too, and made her put on some filthy ragged clothing from the
heaps on the floor. Then she let her go, first making her promise she
would not ask any one to show her the way home.

The poor child could think of nothing else but to find her father's
office at Dombey and Son's, and for two hours she walked, asking the way
of everybody she met. She might not have found it at all, but at a wharf
where she wandered, there happened to be a young clerk of Dombey and
Son's, and the minute he was pointed out to her she felt such trust in
his bright and open face that she caught his hand and sobbed out all her
story.

This lad's name was Walter Gay. He lived with his uncle, honest old
Solomon Gills, a maker of ship's instruments, who kept a little shop
with the wooden figure of a midshipman set outside. Very few customers
ever came into the shop, and, indeed, hardly any one else, for Old Sol,
as the neighbors called him, had only one intimate friend.

This friend was a retired seaman named Captain Cuttle, who always
dressed in blue, as if he were a bird and those were his feathers. He
had a hook instead of a hand attached to his right wrist, a shirt collar
so large that it looked like a small sail, and wherever he went he
carried in his left hand a thick stick that was covered all over (like
his nose) with knobs.

Captain Cuttle used to talk on land just as if he were at sea. He would
say "Steady!" and "Belay, there!" and called Old Sol "Shipmate," as
though the little shop, in which he spent his evenings, was a ship. He
had a deep, rumbling voice, in which he would sing _Lovely Peg_, the
only song he knew, and which he never but once got through to the last
line. But in spite of his queer ways and talk, Captain Cuttle had the
softest, kindest heart in the world. He thought old Solomon Gills the
greatest man alive, and was as fond as possible of "Wal'r," as he called
the nephew. And, indeed, Walter was a handsome boy, and as good as he
was handsome.

Walter soothed Florence's tears and took her, ragged clothes and all,
straight home to Solomon Gills's shop, where his uncle gave her a warm
supper, while Walter ran to the Dombey house with the news that she was
found, and to bring back a dress for her to wear.