ob Mrs. Jarley, their benefactress.
So, to lessen the chance of this, each day she gave him every penny she
earned. This, she soon knew, he gambled away, for often he was out all
night, and even seemed to shun her; so she was sad and took many long
walks alone through the fields.

One evening it happened that she passed a meadow where, beside a hedge,
a fire was burning, with three men sitting and lying around it. She was
in the shadow and they did not see her. One, she saw, was her
grandfather, and the others were the gamblers with whom he had played at
the inn on the night of the storm.

Little Nell crept close. They were tempting the poor daft old man to
steal the money from Mrs. Jarley's strong box, and while she listened
he consented.

She ran home in terrible grief. She tried to sleep, but could not. At
last she could bear it no longer. She went to the old man's room and
wakened him.

"I have had a dreadful dream," she told him, "a dream of an old
gray-haired man like you robbing people of their gold. I can not stay! I
can not leave you here. We must go."

To the crazy old man she seemed an angel. He dressed himself in fear,
and with her little basket on her arm she led him out of the house, on,
away from the town, into the country, far away from Mrs. Jarley, who had
been so kind to them, and from the new home they had found.

They climbed a high hill just as the sun was rising, and far behind them
little Nell caught a last view of the village. As she looked back and
thought how contented they had been there at first, and of the further
wandering that lay before them now, poor little Nell burst into tears.

But at length she bravely dried her tears lest they sadden her
grandfather, and they went on. When the sun grew warm they fell asleep
on the bank of the canal, and when they awoke in the afternoon some
rough canal men took them aboard their dirty craft as far as the next
town.

The men were well-meaning enough and meant the travelers no harm, but
after a while they began to drink and quarreled and fought among
themselves, and little Nell sat all night, wet with the rain, and sang
to them to quiet them.

The place to which they finally came was a town of wretched workmen who
toiled all day in iron furnaces for little wages, and were almost as
miserable and hungry as the wanderers themselves. No one gave them
anything, and they lived for three days with only two penny loaves to
eat (for all their mone