y was now gone), and slept at night in the ashes
of some poor laborer's hut.

The fourth day they dragged themselves into the country again. Little
Nell's shoes were worn through to the bare ground, her feet were
bleeding, her limbs ached and she was deadly faint. They begged, but no
one would help them.

The child's strength was almost gone, when they met a traveler who was
reading in a book as he walked along. He looked up as they came near. It
was the kind old schoolmaster in whose school they had slept before they
met Mrs. Jarley in her house on wheels. When she saw him little Nell
shrieked and fell unconscious at his feet.

The schoolmaster carried her to an inn near by, where she was put to bed
and doctored under his care, for she was very weak. She told him all the
story of their wanderings, and he heard it with astonishment and wonder
to find such a great heart and heroism in a child.

He had been appointed schoolmaster, he told her, in another town, to
which he was then on his way, and he declared they should go with him
and he would care for them. He hired a farm wagon to carry little Nell,
and he and the old man walked beside it, and so they came to their new
place.

Next door to the school-house was the church. A very old woman, nearly a
hundred years old, had lived in a tenement near by to keep the keys and
open the church for services. The old woman was now dead, and the
schoolmaster went to the clergyman and asked that her place be given to
the grandfather, so that he and little Nell could live in the house next
to his own dwelling.

The child sewed the tattered curtains and mended the worn carpet and the
schoolmaster trimmed the long grass and trained the ivy before the door.
In the evening a bright fire was kindled and they all three took their
supper together, and then the schoolmaster said a prayer before they
went gladly to bed.

They were very happy in this new home. The old man lost the insane
thirst for gaming and the mad look faded from his eyes, but poor little
Nell grew paler and more fragile every day. The long days of hunger and
nights of exposure had sowed the seeds of illness.

The whole village soon grew to love her. Many came to visit her and the
schoolmaster read to her each day, so that she was content even when
she could no longer walk abroad as she had always done.

As she lay looking out at the peaceful churchyard, where so many whose
lives were over lay sleeping, it seeme