dy, an' feed mother an' you on
plum-duff an' pork sassengers to breakfast, dinner, an' supper, with ice
cream for a relish!"

Poor Hetty did not even smile at this prospect of temporal felicity.
She felt that in the main the boy was right, and that the only chance he
had of escaping the toils in which her father was wrapping him by the
strange union of affection and villainy, was to leave the country. She
knew, also, that, thanks to the Home of Industry and its promoters, the
sending of a ragged, friendless, penniless London waif, clothed and in
his right mind, to a new land of bright and hopeful prospects, was an
event brought within the bounds of possibility.

That night Bob Frog stood with his dosser, (i.e. his friend), Tim Lumpy,
discussing their future prospects in the partial privacy of a
railway-arch. They talked long, and, for waifs, earnestly--both as to
the land they were about to quit and that to which they were going; and
the surprising fact might have been noted by a listener--had there been
any such present, save a homeless cat--that neither of the boys
perpetrated a joke for the space of at least ten minutes.

"Vy," observed little Frog at length, "you seem to 'ave got all the fun
drove out o' you, Lumpy."

"Not a bit on it," returned the other, with a hurt look, as though he
had been charged with some serious misdemeanour, "but it do seem sitch a
shabby thing to go an' forsake my blind old mother."

"But yer blind old mother wants you to go," said Bobby, "an' says she'll
be well looked arter by the ladies of the 'Ome, and that she wouldn't
stand in the way o' your prospec's. Besides, she ain't yer mother!"

This was true. Tim Lumpy had neither father nor mother, nor relative on
earth, and the old woman who, out of sheer pity, had taken him in and
allowed him to call her "_mother_," was a widow at the lowest possible
round of that social ladder, at the top of which--figuratively
speaking--sits Her Gracious Majesty the Queen. Mrs Lumpy had found him
on her door-step, weeping and in rags, at the early age of five years.
She had taken him in, and fed him on part of a penny loaf which formed
the sole edible substance for her own breakfast. She had mended his
rags to the extent of her ability, but she had not washed his face,
having no soap of her own, and not caring to borrow from neighbours who
were in the same destitute condition. Besides, she had too hard a
battle to fight with an ever-present