tty
positive conclusion, after what he had just heard, that Mr. Forley's
interest in the child was not of the fondest possible kind, Trottle
walked into the front room, and Benjamin's mother, enjoying herself
immensely, followed with the candle.

There were two pieces of furniture in the front garret. One, an old
stool of the sort that is used to stand a cask of beer on; and the other
a great big ricketty straddling old truckle bedstead. In the middle of
this bedstead, surrounded by a dim brown waste of sacking, was a kind of
little island of poor bedding--an old bolster, with nearly all the
feathers out of it, doubled in three for a pillow; a mere shred of
patchwork counter-pane, and a blanket; and under that, and peeping out a
little on either side beyond the loose clothes, two faded chair cushions
of horsehair, laid along together for a sort of makeshift mattress. When
Trottle got into the room, the lonely little boy had scrambled up on the
bedstead with the help of the beer-stool, and was kneeling on the outer
rim of sacking with the shred of counterpane in his hands, just making
ready to tuck it in for himself under the chair cushions.

"I'll tuck you up, my man," says Trottle. "Jump into bed, and let me
try."

"I mean to tuck myself up," says the poor forlorn child, "and I don't
mean to jump. I mean to crawl, I do--and so I tell you!"

With that, he set to work, tucking in the clothes tight all down the
sides of the cushions, but leaving them open at the foot. Then, getting
up on his knees, and looking hard at Trottle as much as to say, "What do
you mean by offering to help such a handy little chap as me?" he began to
untie the big shawl for himself, and did it, too, in less than half a
minute. Then, doubling the shawl up loose over the foot of the bed, he
says, "I say, look here," and ducks under the clothes, head first,
worming his way up and up softly, under the blanket and counterpane, till
Trottle saw the top of the large nightcap slowly peep out on the bolster.
This over-sized head-gear of the child's had so shoved itself down in the
course of his journey to the pillow, under the clothes, that when he got
his face fairly out on the bolster, he was all nightcap down to his
mouth. He soon freed himself, however, from this slight encumbrance by
turning the ends of the cap up gravely to their old place over his
eyebrows--looked at Trottle--said, "Snug, ain't it? Good-bye!"--popped
his face under the