art, she
was a sorrowful little girl. She had none of the things which you like
the best--she did not even know there were such things in the world; she
seldom had enough to eat, and her clothes were very ragged and dirty
indeed.

One afternoon she was playing in the gutter, it happened to be a little
past tea-time, although Mary did not always have any tea; she had no
toys, but there was plenty of mud, and you can make very interesting
things out of mud if you only know the way. Mary kneeled in the road,
with her back to the turning, the soles of a pair of old boots showing
beneath her ragged skirt, as she stooped over the mud, patting it first
on one side then on the other, until it began to look something like the
shape of a loaf of bread. Mary thought how very nice it would be if only
it was a loaf of bread, so that she might eat it, when suddenly she
seemed to hear a loud clap of thunder and the day turned into night.

She did not feel any pain, but the street and the mud all disappeared,
and Mary Brown knew nothing. For a long time, although she never knew
for how long, she was NOWHERE!

It might have been a month or a week or a day or an hour or even only
five minutes or one minute or a second, but when she found herself
SOMEWHERE again it was somewhere else.

Mary had been playing in the road, feeling very hungry, with her hands
on the soft mud, when this strange sensation came to her and she knew
nothing else. And when she opened her eyes again, she was not in the
road any longer, as she would have expected; though for some time yet
she could not imagine where she was or how she had come there.

She was lying on her back, but not upon the floor of the poor house in
William Street; she lay on something quite soft and comfortable far
above the boards. All around her she saw an iron rail, and at the
corners two bright yellow knobs. Above, she saw a clean white ceiling,
whilst the walls, which were a long way from the bed, seemed to be
almost hidden by coloured pictures.

Instead of her ragged dress, Mary wore a clean, white night-gown, and
there was not a speck of mud on her hands, which astonished her more
than anything else.

'They can't be my hands,' she thought; 'they must belong to somebody
else. They look quite clean and white, and I am sure I never had white
hands before.'

Then some one came to the bed-side and stood staring down into Mary's
face. She wore a cotton dress and a white cap and apron