nd not too
regular for hope of a fine development, but chiefly remarkable from
a general effect of something I can only call luminosity. The hair,
which stuck out from his head in every direction, like a round fur
cap, would have been of the red-gold kind, had it not been sunburned
into a sort of human hay. An odd creature altogether the child
appeared, as, shaking the gutter-drops from his little dirty hands,
he gazed from his bare knees on the curbstone at the woman of
rebuke. It was but for a moment. The next he was down, raking in
the gutter again.

The woman looked angry, and took a step forward; but the sound of a
sharp imperative little bell behind her, made her turn at once, and
re-enter the shop from which she had just issued, following a man
whose pushing the door wider had set the bell ringing. Above the
door was a small board, nearly square, upon which was painted in
lead-colour on a black ground the words, "Licensed to sell beer,
spirits, and tobacco to be drunk on the premises." There was no
other sign. "Them 'at likes my whusky 'ill no aye be speerin' my
name," said Mistress Croale. As the day went on she would have more
and more customers, and in the evening on to midnight, her parlour
would be well filled. Then she would be always at hand, and the
spring of the bell would be turned aside from the impact of the
opening door. Now the bell was needful to recall her from house
affairs.

"The likin' 'at craturs his for clean dirt! He's been at it this
hale half-hoor!" she murmured to herself as she poured from a black
bottle into a pewter measure a gill of whisky for the pale-faced
toper who stood on the other side of the counter: far gone in
consumption, he could not get through the forenoon without his
morning. "I wad like," she went on, as she replaced the bottle
without having spoken a word to her customer, whose departure was
now announced with the same boisterous alacrity as his arrival by
the shrill-toned bell--"I wad like, for's father's sake, honest man!
to thraw Gibbie's lug. That likin' for dirt I canna fathom nor
bide."

Meantime the boys attention seemed entirely absorbed in the gutter.
Whatever vehicle passed before him, whatever footsteps behind, he
never lifted his head, but went creeping slowly on his knees along
the curb still searching down the flow of the sluggish, nearly
motionless current.

It was a grey morning towards the close of autumn. The days began
and end