“Na, na,” the mother answered, passionate at last, “she can never be to me what you hae been, my laddie, for you came to me when my hame was in hell, and we tholed it thegither, you and me."’

This bewildered though it comforted him.  He thought his mother might be speaking about the room in which they had lived until six months ago, when his father was put into the black box, but when he asked her if this were so, she told him to sleep, for she was dog-tired.  She always evaded him in this way when he questioned her about his past, but at times his mind would wander backwards unbidden to those distant days, and then he saw flitting dimly through them the elusive form of a child.  He knew it was himself, and for moments he could see it clearly, but when he moved a step nearer it was not there.  So does the child we once were play hide and seek with us among the mists of infancy, until one day he trips and falls into the daylight.  Then we seize him, and with that touch we two are one.  It is the birth of self-consciousness.

Hitherto he had slept at the back of his mother’s bed, but to-night she could not have him there, the place being occupied, and rather sulkily he consented to lie crosswise at her feet, undressing by the feeble fire and taking care, as he got into bed, not to look at the usurper.  His mother watched him furtively, and was relieved to read in his face that he had no recollection of ever having slept at the foot of a bed before.  But soon after he fell asleep he awoke, and was afraid to move lest his father should kick him.  He opened his eyes stealthily, and this was neither the room nor the bed he had expected to see.

The floor was bare save for a sheepskin beside the bed.  Tommy always stood on the sheepskin while he was dressing because it was warm to the feet, though risky, as your toes sometimes caught in knots in it.  There was a deal table in the middle of the floor with some dirty crockery on it and a kettle that would leave a mark, but they had been left there by Shovel’s old girl, for Mrs. Sandys usually kept her house clean.  The chairs were of the commonest, and the press door would not remain shut unless you stuck a knife between its halves; but there, was a gay blue wardrobe, spotted white where Tommy’s mother had scraped off the mud that had once bespattered it during a lengthy sojourn at the door of a shop; and on the mantelpiece was a clock in a little brown and yellow house, and on the clock a Bible that had been in Thrums.  But what Tommy was proudest of was his mother’s kist, to which the chests of Londoners are not to be compared, though like it in appearance.  On the inside of the lid of this kist was pasted, after a Thrums custom, something that his mother called her marriage lines, which she forced Shovel’s mother to come up and look at one day, when that lady had made an innuendo Tommy did not understand, and Shovel’s mother had looked, and though she could not read, was convinced, knowing them by the shape.