And then the neighbour’s wife, whom she had so often helped, came out and began to talk and give her information, rattling on like a steam-engine.  There had been war among the neighbours in the tinsmith’s alley, and now that she saw Barbara herself, the truth should out, the real, actual truth.

The tinsmith’s people need not imagine that other people hadn’t got eyes in their head!  Everything they possessed had gone to the pawnbroker’s; there was barely enough of the tin-ware left to put in his cracked windows.  And what they lived on, nobody round there could imagine, unless it was the payment they got for that poor little ill-used boy, that they gave lager-beer to, to keep him quiet.  For no one would put up there now that the police had begun to keep an eye on the company, not even certain people who were not generally so particular about their quarters.

“But if you take my advice, Barbara, you’ll take the boy to blockmaker Holman’s down at the wharf.  They are such nice, respectable people, and have pitied the boy so when I told them how they were treating him out here.”

Blockmaker Holman, blockmaker Holman!  The name rang in her ears as, heavy-hearted, she entered the tinsmith’s.

There he lay among the ragged, dirty clothes, pale, thin and neglected, with frightened eyes.  He began to cry when she took him up; he did not know her, and she scarcely knew him.

The disappointment—­all that she felt—­found vent in a rising torrent of angry words against the tinsmith and his wife.

But at the same time, while she was washing the boy, she felt how big, coarse and clumsy his face and body were, compared to the two delicate ones she was accustomed to.  She saw now for the first time how impossible it would be to keep him herself.

But he should go to the blockmaker’s, poor boy!  Her name wasn’t Barbara if she didn’t get her mistress to see to that at once—­as early as to-morrow.

She returned home with a face red and swollen with crying, and was inconsolable the whole evening until her mistress came down from the office with the promise that the matter should be arranged.

And thus it was that Nikolai came to blockmaker Holman’s.

CHAPTER II

A STRICT DISCIPLINARIAN

It is in some ways a blessing that those who have suffered hardship and been neglected in their babyhood, do not remember anything about it—­and yet perhaps something clings to them.

So, at any rate, Mrs. Holman declared.  From the very first day the boy came into the house, she could see he had been brought up in a thieves’ nest.  His eyes were so wise and watchful, and he could be so craftily cunning and refractory, long before he could speak.  She declared that he was positively malicious, so drowsy and quiet as he would be until she had just fallen asleep, when he would begin to shout as loud as a watchman.