t up to her and ventured timidly to touch her arm.

"Please, Mrs. Smith," she began.

"Lor' bless me, child, what are you doing out so late, and in this crowd
too?" was her exclamation.

"I can't get in," Pollie sobbed; "oh, what is the matter?"

"What! don't you know? Lor', it's awful," she replied; "here, policeman,
do get this poor child through that there mob; I guess her mother is in
a way about her."

"All right, Mrs. S----," said the man, and to Pollie's astonishment he
took her up in his arms, to carry her through the crowd, who made way
for him to pass with his light burden.

Tallow candles were flaring in the narrow passage, people with pallid,
haggard faces looked out from open room doors; yet with all this
unwonted stir, there seemed to be a strange hushed awe upon them, as
though they were calmed by the mysterious presence of a great calamity.

When the man put Pollie down she glanced from one to another in
trembling alarm, still clinging to her protector's hand.

"Here she is at last," cried a voice; and turning to the speaker she
recognised a woman who lived in the house, and whom she had often met on
the stairs.

"Is it my mother?" asked the child, with undefined dread at her poor
little heart.

"No, no, come with me; he keeps calling for you."

Then, still holding the policeman's hand closely clasped in hers, she
followed the woman down the dirty dark stairs which led to the cellar
where Jimmy lived.

The door of the squalid room stood wide open; two tallow candles stuck
in empty bottles flared on the broken mantel-shelf above the rusty
fireless grate; a battered old chair and a rickety table constituted the
entire furniture of the room (if such it could be called), for on a heap
of dirty rags lay little Jimmy. By his side, holding him in her arms,
knelt Mrs. Turner, whilst a gentleman, evidently the parish doctor, was
bathing his head, from which the blood was flowing. Lizzie Stevens was
there, steeping linen in a basin for the doctor, and another policeman,
no one else. I forgot. Crouching in the farthest corner, and glaring in
drunken stupor around her, was the poor dying child's wretched mother. A
broken bottle tightly grasped in her hands, fragments of which lay
about the dirt-encrusted floor, told the tale, alas! too plainly. In her
drunken fury she had slain her child!

Pollie felt safe directly she saw her own loved mother.

"O mother, what is it?" she whispered.

The dying bo