“Somewheres,” repeated the boy in a louder tone.  “I have been moved on, and moved on, more nor ever I was afore, since the t’other one give me the sov’ring.  Mrs. Snagsby, she’s always a-watching, and a-driving of me—­what have I done to her?—­and they’re all a-watching and a-driving of me.  Every one of ’em’s doing of it, from the time when I don’t get up, to the time when I don’t go to bed.  And I’m a-going somewheres.  That’s where I’m a-going.  She told me, down in Tom-all-Alone’s, as she came from Stolbuns, and so I took the Stolbuns Road.  It’s as good as another.”

He always concluded by addressing Charley.

“What is to be done with him?” said I, taking the woman aside.  “He could not travel in this state even if he had a purpose and knew where he was going!”

“I know no more, ma’am, than the dead,” she replied, glancing compassionately at him.  “Perhaps the dead know better, if they could only tell us.  I’ve kept him here all day for pity’s sake, and I’ve given him broth and physic, and Liz has gone to try if any one will take him in (here’s my pretty in the bed—­her child, but I call it mine); but I can’t keep him long, for if my husband was to come home and find him here, he’d be rough in putting him out and might do him a hurt.  Hark!  Here comes Liz back!”

The other woman came hurriedly in as she spoke, and the boy got up with a half-obscured sense that he was expected to be going.  When the little child awoke, and when and how Charley got at it, took it out of bed, and began to walk about hushing it, I don’t know.  There she was, doing all this in a quiet motherly manner as if she were living in Mrs. Blinder’s attic with Tom and Emma again.

The friend had been here and there, and had been played about from hand to hand, and had come back as she went.  At first it was too early for the boy to be received into the proper refuge, and at last it was too late.  One official sent her to another, and the other sent her back again to the first, and so backward and forward, until it appeared to me as if both must have been appointed for their skill in evading their duties instead of performing them.  And now, after all, she said, breathing quickly, for she had been running and was frightened too, “Jenny, your master’s on the road home, and mine’s not far behind, and the Lord help the boy, for we can do no more for him!” They put a few halfpence together and hurried them into his hand, and so, in an oblivious, half-thankful, half-insensible way, he shuffled out of the house.

“Give me the child, my dear,” said its mother to Charley, “and thank you kindly too!  Jenny, woman dear, good night!  Young lady, if my master don’t fall out with me, I’ll look down by the kiln by and by, where the boy will be most like, and again in the morning!” She hurried off, and presently we passed her hushing and singing to her child at her own door and looking anxiously along the road for her drunken husband.